Tom Box thinks that both Ash and Murphy are AIs. Here’s his reasoning…
I believe only “Class Real” happens in the real world. Ash and Murphy are experimental, sophisticated AI entities. The culmination of the project that they are part of is in bringing them into the real world to participate in it among ordinary people. Murphy disintegrating showed that he was VR or holographic, but not necessarily that the world was.
Why Ash could be AI: The world in Ash’s daily life, not just in the game, looks relatively simple and the color is washed out before Ash goes to Class Real. That was the first reason I thought that world might be a Virtual World. So Ash’s whole world, all the time, is a Virtual World, and the game would be an artificial world within an artificial world. And why bother to go that far unless Ash, too, was artificial? She has never seen the “real” Real World, but she couldn’t know that. I expect that, if you were sufficiently sophisticated as an AI, knowing you were artificial would seriously affect your psychology including your outlook on life. This could make it more difficult to prepare you for actually living in the real world when the time came, if you follow me.
If Ash was AI, then she proved herself through competition as one of the very best, and therefore most ready to handle challenges and complexity, and earned the chance to enter Class Real. She then saw the Real World for the first time. She saw the complexity and color and was surprised. Then when she started talking to Murphy, he pointed out that her hair didn’t look like it always had when she was inside a game. Then he talked about feeling real pain in a real body.
In the Emotion English subtitle, he says, “Ash… dont let appearances confuse you. This is the world… where you belong.” The Japanese used in that last sentence was “Koko ni … omae no genjitsu non da.” Genjitsu means “reality” as opposed to a dream. So to me, it sounds a bit more like, “This is … your reality (not a dream).”
If we accept then that they were at that point in the Real World, then what happened to him next would prove that he at least was still artificial, as people’s bodies don’t usually do what his eventually did, in the Real World, when shot.
He had already decided to sacrifice himself to give Ash the opportunity to live in the World that he had given up everything to experience, if only temporarily.