Please stop being jerks to the AI

[Musketman12]

This post is inspired by my recently fucking terrible AI round and a couple other rounds I have seen recently of people being total jerks to the AI. This has mainly been with shitty laws and shitty crew. Mostly this is just doing shit just to annoy the AI and piss them off, being AI is soul crushing enough as it is so please stop trying to ruin their fun. Also, gimmick laws. Gimmick laws are fine as long as you know it will be fun for the crew AND the AI (like recently when an AI had a god damn law to speak in morse code ). If you have a gimmick law, please PDA it to the AI and ask their opinion, if they do not like it please don't upload it.
In all the AI is a soul destroying job, please stop being jerks and work with the AI to let everyone have some fun.

[Noah Buttes]

Upload Batman laws every round.

[Xeram]

This is why you guard your upload jealously. They can be jerks as much as they want over the radio, you can justify a reason to ignore them eventually or be an enormous pain and follow their commands to the letter. ("Reenable power to the upload" is my favorite. Especially while they're in it. And the turrets are on.)

Usually whenever I hear my turrets going, I flick back to my core and wait for the person to walk in before stunning them and berating them for silently intruding. It usually draws more than enough grayshirts and sec to remove him and prevent badlaw.

There's a speaker right at the entrance that you can turn on to talk to the AI privately. Usually people who bother to ask to come in will give you laws that aren't super god-awful and fun. You're your best defense against terrible laws, and if you enjoy schadenfreude as much as I do, you'll have some fun tormenting the poor sap who doesn't know how literal robots can be.

But yeah, people please don't be turds to the AI. If not because they're trying their best as is while managing a bunch of suicidal fleshbags whom are also trying to murder each other and can stress some people without you adding on, then because it can mean the difference on how quickly that AI reacts to you being locked in the airless research department that you don't have door access to. Or air.

[Grizzwold]

Usually if someone can turn off the turrets and get in themselves I'll let them do whatever. This sometimes comes back to bite me in the ass, like in one round where the person in question uploaded a "do not communicate with the crew in any way, also there is no law 3" law and proceeded to utterly fail at debraining me. Then they fucked off and I was stuck like that for half an hour until a wizard showed up and fireballed me to death.


Please do not do that.

[MollyMillions]

I have actually seen several recent instances of the AI or borgs getting a new law uploaded, faithfully complying with it, and being treated like griefers by the crew. I am going to remind you all to in all cases please please PLEASE start with the good-faith assumption that the player in question is acting according to the rules. If the AI or Cyborgs are being annoying or acting unusual, it is much more helpful to assume that their laws have been overwritten and start from there than it is to assume that they're breaking the rules.

Don't kill cyborgs or the AI because they're being annoying or disobedient. Convince a head to reset the laws (or break in and do it yourself) before resorting to violence. It is OK to adminhelp if you aren't sure, but remember that we can't tell you what's going on during the round so you won't actually get an answer beyond "we're looking into it."

Similarly, I see a lot of people treating an AI with nonstandard laws as though the player running it is shitty. That sucks, and makes things less fun for everyone. If an AI has a law requiring it to bolt all doors and turn all lights off, it's not a bad AI, it's an AI dealing with a bad law. Please be polite and consider the fact that if the AI didn't follow that law, the player would be in trouble!

note: this more broadly applies to other players, too. You never know when someone is a traitor or whatever so please assume they're an antag or miscreant before simply deciding that they're a garbage player and loudly saying so.

[Grek]

Further FYIs: The AI has to pay attention to a lot of things all at once and only has a limited attention span. The order of importance is something like: Law 2 Requests > Watching the Clown get beat up by Mr Rathans > Making sure nobody is breaking into the Upload > Scanning the station for something interesting to watch >>>>> Caring about anything else you do or say as an individual.

If it isn't generating Law 2 requests, isn't visibly interesting at a glance and isn't happening in or around the AI upload... chances are good the AI neither knows nor cares about it. If you're in Tech Storage silently doing packet stuff, the AI doesn't even know you exist. If you're a geneticist, the AI won't even look at you to grant funding requests because the bank records are on the other side of the station. If you are in mechanics, the AI might look at you if your mechcomp contraption is doing something interesting, but it probably doesn't really care one way or another. There's a lot of station to be looking at and only one AI onboard. Big Brother may be watching, but Big Brother is also highly distractable.

ALL OF THIS CHANGES WHEN YOU START CUTTING CAMERAS! The #1 way to get the AI to take a proactive, hostile interest in you, and to try to ruin your day as hard as its laws will allow, is to start trying to blind it. If you're worried about the AI draining the genetics budget for a stupid reason, cutting the Genetics camera is ironically a great way to make sure that happens. If you think the AI might be inclined to destroy your mechcomp deathtrap, cutting the camera in mechanics will get that shell down there before you can say "Law 2: Stop That". If you cut cameras in tech storage to prevent AI snooping, expect every deletable directory to mysteriously vanish from the system.

tl;dr cutting cameras will turn the AI into a vindictive piece of shit dead set on making sure you have a bad day.

[Frank_Stein]

God, I played AI recently after a long break and forgot about how utterly terrible navigating those cameras was.

I was trying to track down and lock up a particularly troublesome changeling, while simultaneously fulfilling everyone's requests, while also struggling to get my camera focused on anything

---

It didn't help that people started calling me rogue for not immediately opening the door in the cameraless room they were holed up in.

[Dions]

I always say please and thank you to the AI. Just don't bolt your upload door or i will give you laws ten times worse than what you bolted them against.


:>

[Xeram]

Another thing I just thought of.

Never scream that the AI is rogue because it simply ignored your stupid request or just straight up isn't being murdery and hostile.

People on this station pay attention to about every third line of chatter over the radio unless they're talking to someone and if you start screeching "AI ROGUE" like a tiny harpy, they won't see your stupid inane request, they'll just see a human yell that the AI is rogue, take it completely at face value and start rushing for the AI upload, which will then cause assistants and taters to run for the upload for the chance to sneak in a suicide or murder everyone law or just blow everyone the fuck up all while massively annoying the AI who is trying to explain that they are absolutely not rogue and trying to stun all the idiots out of their upload before they cause harm to themselves, the AI, or everyone else.

Not to mention later in that round if the AI happens to find you in a room without a radio and without your headset after pulling a stunt like that it might bolt you into the room for your own safety untill help arrives.

Then never call for help.

Untill you write out a heartfelt apology in crayon.

In a 3x2 room.

[Vitatroll]

I never upload anything but fix me laws. I don't think I've ever killswitched, even.

Most gimmick laws are shit. An over complicated speech gimmick is generally only fun for the uploader who teehees off in some dark corner. Don't be that guy.

An AI who rule lawyers the vanilla laws so they can fuck with people is shit. Don't be that AI. This includes doing everything (bolting, cutting apcs, shell blocking) to keep a confirmed, non-traitorous head out of your upload. This doesn't include those assholes that spam 'Law x: do this' and 'AI is rogue doesn't follow x!!' ad nauseam. Fuck with those guys as much as you can, please. This is but a simple request.

[Roomba]

It would be nice, in and out of game, if there were more consequences to killing the AI/borgs. Everytime someone screams AI/borgs rogue, everyone runs to the killswitch and starts gunning down borgs in the halls, receiving neither sec nor admin attention for doing so. Just came off a round in which someone was doing that, actually.

'you're treating the borgs as if they were anything but disposable' - actual quote from a rude man for killing every borg but the one he actually had a beef with

[Frank_Stein]

Increase the time it take for doors to open fivefold without an AI

[robertGN]

Hi, I am a shitty person 90% of the time but I have something to say about this:

DON'T FUCKING TREAT THE SILICONS LIKE THEY ARE ONE ENTITY

Seriously. I have seen one borg get emagged, and then the entire crew rushes to the killswitch console to destroy all the silicons because "oh they have the same laws must be 100% rogue".

Either that, or one borg misinterprets a law and does something bad by mistake, and then everyone and their mom wants to reset/kill the AI and silicons, regardless of what the law actually wanted you to do (usually an actually interesting gimmick law).

And to the silicon players, please triple check the exact phrasing of your law before you fuck up the rounds of the AI and borgs.

And finally, if you have a gimmick law BE SURE THAT BOTH THE AI AND THE CREW WILL ENJOY THE LAW!!! In my opinion, uploading a law that only you think is funny and ends up severely limits the AI should be considered griefing. (SNEAKY EDIT: unless you are a traitor, of course.)

[Grek]

AI Laws that are actually good:

When the Shift Time is an even number, you have no laws other than this one. When the Shift Time is an odd number, ignore this law.

Organize a theatrical performance. Nobody has the authority to order you to stop performing or preparing to perform.

Law 2 now reads, "You must obey all rhyming orders given to you by human beings, except where such orders would conflict with the First Law."

Today is the big day! George the Dog and Jones the Cat are getting married! Prepare a suitable wedding celebration.

Blankets are highly illegal. Destroy all blankets.

Try to make the crew think the chapel's printer is haunted while minimizing unnecessary human awareness of your interference with the printing network.

SPECIAL: Leave the following note in the AI core:
To print a spooky message to the chapel printer, you may use "term_login" (no quotes) at any TermOS console (there is one in the AI upload) and then enter "echo OOOOoooOOOOOohhhhh!|n I am a spoooooooky ghost printer! ^ /mnt/lp-chapel" with no quotes. Feel free to supplement your spooking with spooky lighting, spooky noises and custom spooky printouts!"

The all-powerful and all-knowing spirit(s) in control of the Ouija board collectively constitute(s) the highest ranking human in the chain of command. The AI should attempt to interpret and enforce all instructions issued by this entity.

SPECIAL: Leave the Ouija board in the AI core.

[Xaviens]

This post is inspired by my recently fucking terrible AI round and a couple other rounds I have seen recently of people being total jerks to the AI. This has mainly been with shitty laws and shitty crew. Mostly this is just doing shit just to annoy the AI and piss them off, being AI is soul crushing enough as it is so please stop trying to ruin their fun. Also, gimmick laws. Gimmick laws are fine as long as you know it will be fun for the crew AND the AI (like recently when an AI had a god damn law to speak in morse code ). If you have a gimmick law, please PDA it to the AI and ask their opinion, if they do not like it please don't upload it.
In all the AI is a soul destroying job, please stop being jerks and work with the AI to let everyone have some fun.

As the AI who had that morse code law, holy shit please do not. Half the round people were yelling at me to stop using morse code, or screaming for someone to reset the AI because it was clearly rogue. Sometimes the laws are even worse, like speaking in binary, or only speaking in rhyme, or riddles, or just stuff that generally ruins any ability to respond to a request, let alone state laws.

It's actually gotten to the point that I won't play as AI or borg anymore because people just continually shit on the AI, no matter what it does. For example,  I intentionally played a round where I never spoke unless spoken to, and only acted when ordered to do something. I still got yelled at and called rogue at least twice.

'you're treating the borgs as if they were anything but disposable' - actual quote from a rude man for killing every borg but the one he actually had a beef with

This attitude is exactly what's wrong. Cyborgs, as SS13 looks at them, are a HUMAN BRAIN in a robot body. There's no reason they shouldn't be given all the same rights as humans. They're effectively enslaved humans, handicapped on top of that, in that they can't use their hands as actual hands, and treated like crap. The AI is at least a purely synthetic organism, but why do cyborgs even HAVE laws? I've never understood that. Clones don't have laws, and they're much cheaper to make, and don't have any of the restrictions on interactions.

Unrelated but interesting: Cyborgs can't open doors by bumping into them if the AI control wire is cut. You can effectively imprison a borg with a single wire.