It is possible that AI can perfectly replicate human intelligence. But because it is purely digital, I cannot kill it - I can delete it, copy it, recreate it, and so on but never kill it. Only biological organisms can die.
Therefore no matter what happens, there is a distinction between human intelligence and AI. I can destroy an AI creature and the only penalty should be property damage (if relevant).
So if you lost the weights how is that not killing the AI? Is it because it lacks the death experience? If so what about bitrotting the weights incrementally and degrading its inputs?
Machines running AI can certainly die, that is why chaos monkeys and kubernetes etc. exist. They can be backed up, unlike humans though. Although humans are backed up by virtue of there being 8 billion of them, so if one dies, the world can keep going on pretty much as before, albeit with some sadness for some of the people. This sounds morbid, but hard to avoid when comparing humans to machines!
If an AI has mutable memory, and could be convinced to damage its memory in such a way that it no longer acts usefully (or does so by accident), is that functionally different from "death"?
This doesn't really apply to GPT, where the core functionality is immutable.
Therefore no matter what happens, there is a distinction between human intelligence and AI. I can destroy an AI creature and the only penalty should be property damage (if relevant).