Board Thread:Speculation House/@comment-10380701-20140808014446/@comment-25154376-20140815084126

Perhaps in the RWBY universe souls work to where if an organism, organic or not, is self-aware and capable of free-will it automatically qualifies as having a soul. So, in order for Penny to have a soul, all her "father" would needed to have done was create a self-aware AI(which seems possible in the RWBY-verse, seeing as how advanced technology there is).

...Now that I think about it, this is starting to sound a lot like Ghost in the Shell.