That's interesting. A normal computer program when it gets in a scenario it can't deal with will throw an exception and stop. A human when dealing with something weird like "make Obama rewrite the Bible in Chinese" will just say "WTF?"

But it seems a flaw in these systems is that it doesn't know when something is just garbage that there's nothing that can be done with it.

Reminds me of when Google had an AI that could play Starcraft 2, and it was playing on the ladder anonymously. Lowko is this guy that streams games, and he was unknowingly playing it and beat it. What was interesting is the AI just kinda freaked out and started doing random things. Lowko (not knowing it was an AI) thought the other player was just showing bad manners because you're supposed to concede when you know you've lost because otherwise you're just wasting the other player's time. Apparently the devs at google had to monitor games being played by the AI to force it to concede when it lost because the AI couldn't understand that there was no longer any way it could win the game.

It seems like AI just can't understand when it should give up.

It's like some old sci-fi where they ask a robot an illogical question and its head explodes. Obviously it's more complicated than that, but cool that there's real questions in the same vein as that.

It's weird that Republicans latched onto something Obama did that Mr Bush did a few times each.

Except, in the past, tan suits and coloured face paint weren't a sin; now we see it's only an issue for them based on who's doing it and whether they can rephrase and leverage it. Put Obama in mime makeup and a tan suit and some barely-used heads will explode.