Trope-a-Day: Literal Genie

Literal Genie: This is what you get quite often if you have a big ol’ liking for Asimovian AI-constraints, because it turns out it’s bloody hard to write (in, y’know, code) a version of the Second Law – A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law. – that allows for any kind of discretion, interpretation, or suchlike.

The Unwise GenAI of the fairy tale probably knew, or could know had it had cause to reflect for a moment, perfectly well that that wasn’t what they wanted, but, y’know, it wasn’t designed to give people what they wanted, it was constrained to give people what they asked for – and the results thereafter were entirely predictable.