Your answer clarifies what I was trying to get at with my question but wasn't quite sure how to ask, thanks; my question was deeply muddled.

For my own part, treating a tulpa as having the moral status of an independent individual distinct from its creator seems unjustified. I would be reluctant to destroy one because it is the unique and likely-unreconstructable creative output of a human being, much like I would be reluctant to destroy a novel someone had written (as in, erase all copies of such that the novel itself no longer exists), but that's about as far as I go.

I didn't mean a physical copy of a novel, sorry that wasn't clear.

Yes, destroying all memory of a character someone played in an RPG and valued remembering I would class similarly.

But all of these are essentially property crimes, whose victim is the creator of the artwork (or more properly speaking the owner, though in most cases I can think of the roles are not really separable), not the work of art itself.

I have no idea what "torture a novel" even means, it strikes me as a category error on a par with "paint German blue" or "burn last Tuesday".