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People are weird. A person shooting random npcs in GTA likely isn't a murderer in real life, and someone that does awful things to a bot probably isn't a documented sex offender. When it is real people interactions consent is important, until AI gains sentience this is no more or less creepy than people who have inflatables.

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I know that playing laser tag has in no way made me want to shoot people in real life. However, if we had real evidence (and I don’t think we do?) that laser tag increased actual shootings, I would understand if it suddenly became much more restricted.

The genuine concern here should be around whether a potential offender having a bot contributes to actual assaults that would not have happened otherwise.

We have plenty of evidence for other media (like computer games) that the effect is opposite. People who are able to roleplay their violent tendencies in synthetic virtual worlds are less likely to realize them in the real world.

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