The tech companies say they are monitoring the use of their tools and have instituted some policies against using them to produce political content. But enforcing those rules may be difficult. In January, OpenAI suspended a developer that had made a bot of the Democratic candidate Dean Phillips, only after a report in The Washington Post. The developer had made similar bots of political candidates in the fall.

How do we gain access to artificial intelligence's huge potential benefits – such as devising new life-saving drugs or finding new ways to teach children – without opening a box of horrors? If we're not careful, AI could be a Frankenstein monster. It might eliminate nearly all jobs. It could lead to autonomous warfare. Even such a mundane goal as making as many paper clips as possible, critics of AI argue, could push an all-powerful AI to end all life on Earth in pursuit of more clips.