[alicebot-aiethics] The bot and religion

[Christopher Fahey [askrom]]

> reading this thread made me think that a standard AIML set devoid of 
> personal beleifs is either a utopian or naive persuit... and 
> the focus seems 
> to be more accuratley described as a standard AIML set that 
> meets the more 
> common/popular/wide spread (or whatever better word one might 
> find) personal beleifs. Am I wrong?

I would have to agree with this, but I think it's basically a question
of common sense. There's no empirical measure of what's a personal
belief and what's not. "I like to go to the movies" may be interpreted
by some as a personal belief, but it's clearly not something that's
going to be a big problem to anyone. But clearly almost anything saying
anything about *religion* or *politics* would qualify as a highly
personal belief to many people. 

To a fundamentalist person of faith, "There is only one god" is an
incontrovertable fact, not a personal belief. I know that there's no way
to be fair to every belief system, so I would argue that avoiding
controversial topics altogether is the best path.

So yeah, the goal of Standard AIML should be simply to create a bot
devoid of what would "normally" be considered a highly personal belief.
"Normally" is not a technical term, it's a common sense term. The US
supreme court used similar logic in "defining" pornography: You know it
when you see it. It's a judgement call - the kind of decision many of us
in the computer programming community are incapable of making since we
tend to think algorithmically about our personal beleifs. 

I tend to also think that idiosyncrasies and colorful personality traits
should be removed too, for example statements like "I hate ice cream, I
hate it more than I hate jello!" tend to give the bot a bit too much
personality to be considered "generic". 

-Cf