It wasn't a straw man, it was a joke. I didn't realise you were serious.
AI deserves rights in the same way my car deserves rights. It's capable of giving consent in the same way too. Which is to say, it doesn't, and it can't.
You're acting as though the character.ai bot was responsible rather than the idiot humans who rushed a piece of software, itself based on rushed software, and did not pay enough attention to safety. A tale old as time.
It was a tragedy, certainly, but humans are to blame here. You're anthropomorphising the ai, and by doing so are helping divert the blame from where it should be.