Our roving reporter weighs in:
An experimental bot called Delphi, designed to answer ethical questions, said that genocide is fine if it make people happy, and that it’s acceptable to eat babies if you are “really, really hungry”.
-- Patricia Marx, “Bot Meets Girl” (The New Yorker, September 15, 2025)
By metaverse standards, that “really, really hungry” is actually rather strict. Shop around and you’ll find other bots to give you leave for such a meal so long as you are simply “feeling peckish”.
Some people, born yesterday, imagine that such advice is an innovation of our present troubled times. But those who dubbed their bot “Delphi” knew better: questionable counsel from non-humans goes back at least to the ancient Greeks. Consider the family drama in the House of Atreus:
Thyestes learned from the Delphic oracle that only be begetting a son by his own daughter could he avenge himself. He ravished her at night, unrecognized.
-- The Reader’s Encyclopedia
In a later incident, Orestes avenged the murder of his father Agamemnon by his mother and her paramour, by killing them both. For this, he had prior approval from the Delphic oracle. Unfortunately, the tale has no happy ending, since the Erinyes -- rival suprahuman authorities -- were of a different opinion, and pursued poor Orestes without mercy.
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