User blog comment:PerhapsTheOtherOne/Synthetics In RWBY and Beyond: What's that all about?/@comment-5426254-20150602000749/@comment-24891101-20150602002536

My take on this you can probably glean from below, but I'd say that in this universe, AI can only go so far, before you have to start imitating life. That is, I think the soul is here tied to a neural net, which in my mind distinguishes Penny from AIs. That is, those emotions and such which are tied to Aura are in an AI only good imitations, which could theoretically be very convincing, but are in some way not Aura generating, while the definite articles do generate Aura, as in humans and Penny, ultimately because of their architecture. This theory also suggests that the Grimm may be artificial, and more akin to an AI than to animals, from a mental architecture perspective.