You can’t hold AI responsible
Your work is your responsibility. However, AIs isn’t.
Over the past year, I’ve spent much time considering the lines that separate work and responsibility. Largely in the context of AI as it’s leveraged in workplaces.
It seems to me that most human systems rely foremost on the delegation of responsibility. Work, like preparing a presentation or responding to a customer email, gets done in the name of an individual’s responsibility. Likewise, if a person is not responsible for something, have fun expecting them to work on it.
A customer service rep is responsible for handling certain communications between customers and their company. If they do not do the work expected of them — or do it poorly — they are foremost failing their responsibility. So when we think of the most valued people in an organization, it gets expressed “they’re taking on/have a lot of responsibility” as opposed to “they do/deliver a specific work output.”
No one would say, “that printer is responsible for printing.” The simplest reason being that a printer cannot assume responsibility, it can only print. Similarly, a text generation model cannot assume responsibility or be held responsible for what it writes, it can only write; a self-driving model cannot assume responsibility or be held responsible for how it…
