And yet, “having agency” is how they are advertised. That’s what the term “agentic” means. AI instances are called “agents”! That’s part of the marketing.
It’s easy to handwave this away as “people are stupid”, and there’s certainly some truth to that, but the reason why people believe that LLMs are agents is because tech bros have spent a lot of money to get them believe that. That’s also why they spread the myth that LLMs are potentially dangerous because they could become conscious and kill all of us. It helps to spread the myth of LLM agency. Of course they can’t become conscious, because that isn’t how things work. If LLMs are killing people, it’s because somebody put an LLM in front of the kill switch and they wanted to have plausible deniability. That is perhaps the most pernicious thing about LLMs: people using them to avoid responsibility. “It isn’t my fault! The bot did it!”
And yet, “having agency” is how they are advertised. That’s what the term “agentic” means. AI instances are called “agents”! That’s part of the marketing.
It’s easy to handwave this away as “people are stupid”, and there’s certainly some truth to that, but the reason why people believe that LLMs are agents is because tech bros have spent a lot of money to get them believe that. That’s also why they spread the myth that LLMs are potentially dangerous because they could become conscious and kill all of us. It helps to spread the myth of LLM agency. Of course they can’t become conscious, because that isn’t how things work. If LLMs are killing people, it’s because somebody put an LLM in front of the kill switch and they wanted to have plausible deniability. That is perhaps the most pernicious thing about LLMs: people using them to avoid responsibility. “It isn’t my fault! The bot did it!”