I think the GitS material is probably best treated as individual installments. The second movie was some sort of weird art film I struggled to watch. What I got out of the first one was that Kusanagi may or may not actually be a person. There may be one (or more) instances of Kusanagi in the world and the ambiguity the movie plays with is "Is she a person in a cybernetic body or is this a convenient lie to the AI inside the body?"
If we assume she's an AI - at what point does she become individual "enough" to be a defacto "person"? There's a lot of Asimov in this question. The puppetmaster adds a level of abstraction to this by not requiring a 1:1 mapping between a ghost and a body.
If we assume she's a person - do we count her as a human because she only briefly had a body of flesh and bone? What does this "internet in her head" do to affect her psyche and personal development?
If we assume she's an AI - at what point does she become individual "enough" to be a defacto "person"? There's a lot of Asimov in this question. The puppetmaster adds a level of abstraction to this by not requiring a 1:1 mapping between a ghost and a body.
If we assume she's a person - do we count her as a human because she only briefly had a body of flesh and bone? What does this "internet in her head" do to affect her psyche and personal development?