Contemporary HAL has Limited Vocabulary
This video, “Four Letter Words,” is cool for several reasons. First of all, this engineer has found a way to depict all 26 letters in an arrangement of fluorescent bars; the linguistic equivalent of a digital clock radio display. Secondly, the words that come up are entirely of the computer’s choosing. They are assembled by an algorithm from a word association database.
So, yeah. Those strings of words were actually chosen by the computer, itself. HAL seems rather repressed. I’d leave those pod bay doors closed if I were you.