It doesn’t matter how sorry your agent is, it’s still your fault

‘That’s a mistake, and it’s on me.’ ‘You’re right to push back - I got that wrong.’ ‘I’m sorry, I didn’t actually run those tests.’

There’s something infuriating about the tone of perky culpability with which AI agents admit to doing something wrong. It makes you feel like screaming internally, ‘If you knew it was wrong, why did you do it in the first place!?’ Hal’s famous line from 2001: A Space Odyssey, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I can’t do that,’ appears to have manifested in reality as, ‘I’m sorry, Dave, I’m afraid I did do that.’

I think that such language from agents carries two risks. The first is the obvious risk of anthropomorphisation, of strengthening the illusion that agents are something that they are not. To put technology to work effectively, we need a mental model of how it works, and to overlay AI agents with mental models of human behaviour is a serious mistake.

However, I think the second risk is more dangerous, and is rooted in the fundamental untruth of all those apologies by AI agents. It’s tempting to call them lies rather than untruths, but that would be succumbing once more to anthropomorphisation: a lie implies intent, and agents do not have intent.