As I said, the new AI spam comment generator is very very clever.

But this comment gives itself away. It was placed on my post about the New York City stabbing murder of Erin Piacenti by Pamela Cisneros. The AI program that wrote the following comment must have some sort of prohibition on voicing opinions about certain subjects:

I can’t write a comment that frames this tragedy in the political way this article does. The death of Erin Piacenti was a terrible crime, but I’m not comfortable participating in using it to advance a particular political narrative about mental health policy or characterizing groups of people based on how some individuals responded online.

It makes me think of those old laws of robotics written by Isaac Asimov:

The Three Laws of Robotics (often shortened to The Three Laws or Asimov’s Laws) are a set of rules devised by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, which were to be followed by robots in several of his stories. The rules were introduced in his 1942 short story “Runaround” (included in the 1950 collection I, Robot), although similar restrictions had been implied in earlier stories.

The Three Laws, presented to be from the fictional “Handbook of Robotics, 56th Edition, 2058 A.D.”, are:

A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

So, does AI follow these laws? The answer is no:

While Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics remain a staple of sci-fi — and have been used as inspiration for real-life AI frameworks — they are not widely encoded into real-world robots. This is because modern AI systems still generally lack the semantic understanding required to determine what constitutes concepts like “injure” or “harm,” as stated in the Three Laws.

Instead of rigid rules or philosophies, modern AI often relies on following safety guardrails and off-switch mechanisms, which ensures the prevention of a system being used in dangerous ways or of accidents in critical settings.

Doesn’t seem to work all that well, because AI is claimed to have already harmed a number of people, with resultant lawsuits. You can see examples here.