If I build a chat bot that encourages people to off themselves, am I in the clear because I didn’t take any destructive action and my chat bot didn’t either?
My question though it's another: is it malware a software that does a stdout print, or is it malware a software that takes untrusted instructions and executes commands it decides based on it?
If that print is intended to cause damage, then yes.
> or is it malware a software that takes untrusted instructions and executes commands it decides based on it?
No, bash is not malware, even if you pipe curl to it.