Off-station AIs and borgs

[Tegun]

In short, if a borg is created on station but unintentionally (roboticist forgetting to set the correct AI to sync with, not even aware of there being a second AI, borg factory bug...) synced with an AI off station, possibly with anti-station laws such as the Cybersun core lawset, what should the borg do?

With the merge of Cybersun ship this issue will keep showing up in rounds more often than usually. Normally I've faced this problem with free golem AIs, who are thankfully usually Asimov with a law 4 to treat golems as humans, or when I'm malf and the borg factory starts spewing out borgs synced to another, asimov AI. Oh boy those are fun. In the case of borg factory I imagine a code solution would be in place, but it is hard to assume a roboticist on the station would be aware of AIs being built on the drone station, free golem ship, derelict station or Cybersun ship. Cybersun in particular becomes troublesome because it is extremely unlikely to be asimov. There is no intent from the roboticist to build a cyborg that immediately murders them and starts sabotaging station. Borg on the other hand is compelled to follow their laws even if there's no IC explanation to as to why it has been linked to something the crew is not aware of. Vice versa, it would be very awkward if Cybersun agents built a borg that was slaved to the station AI.

I had a quick glance through rules and headmin rulings, I did not find anything related to a borg being slaved to a wrong AI. In my humble opinion this comes down to rule 1: don't be a dick. A borg who is clearly synced to an AI who has no connection to the people who actually built the cyborg should have good faith in their builder and inform that they made a mistake. Doubly so for borgs created by borging machine.

Spoiler:

I suppose a code solution could be provided by making choosing an AI to sync with an unskippable part of building a borg, but at the time of writing that is not the reality we live in.

[Not-Dorsidarf]

I think this should be a code change to make it not possible to accidentally sync borgs to off-map AIs.

Policy wise at the moment the borg is obliged to follow their laws to the best of their ability in good faith at all times, just as with all silicons.

[zxaber]

Making borgs unable to autosync (or even manual sync) with AIs on other Z levels has been something I've been meaning to do for a while. Generally after the ~10 minute mark I start manually syncing borgs to the station AI to avoid them being synced to a golem AI, and removing that possibility has been a "when I get to it" priority. If there's a ghost role antag now causing issues, I will bump that priority up a bit.

[Vekter]

Yeah, this really should be a code thing. Shouldn't be possible to link to AIs not on the same z-level. I've at least once linked to ROGUS on Manuel who usually has no laws.

[TheMidnghtRose]

Not 100% sure on this but golem created cyborgs might still link to the station AI due to the weird interaction with lavaland and the station with the Station AI as it can control Mining base equipment and mess with anything it can see on lavaland even though the reverse is not true.

[zxaber]

A fix has been merged that prevents borg syncing to AIs on other Z levels entirely. The two exceptions are if the borg and AI are both on a station Z level (to accommodate multi-Z stations), and borg machines (which bypass the normal sync process entirely).