We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.
Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.
We attribute agency to everything, absolutely. But previously, we understood that it’s tongue-in-cheek to some extend. Now we got crazy and do it for real. Like, a lot of people talk about their car as if it’s alive, they gave it a name, they talk about it’s character and how it’s doing something “to spite you” and if it doesn’t start in cold weather, they ask it nicely and talk to it. But when you start believing for real that your car is a sentient object that talks to you and gives you information, we always understood that this is the time when you need to be committed to a mental institution.
With chatbots this distinction got lost, and people started behaving as if it’s actually sentient. It’s not a metaphor anymore. This is a problem, even if it’s not the problem.
I think this confuses the ‘it’s a person’ metaphor with the ‘it wants something’ metaphor, and the two are meaningfully distinct. The use of agent here in this thread is not in the sense of “it is my friend and deserves a luxury bath”, it’s in the sense of “this is a hard to predict system performing tasks to optimize something”.
It’s the kind of metaphor we’ve allowed in scientific teaching and discourse for centuries (think: “gravity wants all master smashed together”). I think it’s use is correct here.
We attribute agency to many many systems that are not intelligent. In this metaphorical sense, agency just requires taking actions to achieve a goal. It was given a goal: raise money for charity via doing acts of kindness. It chose an (unexpected!) action to do it.
Overactive agency metaphors really aren’t the problem here. Surely we can do better than backlash at the backlash.
We attribute agency to everything, absolutely. But previously, we understood that it’s tongue-in-cheek to some extend. Now we got crazy and do it for real. Like, a lot of people talk about their car as if it’s alive, they gave it a name, they talk about it’s character and how it’s doing something “to spite you” and if it doesn’t start in cold weather, they ask it nicely and talk to it. But when you start believing for real that your car is a sentient object that talks to you and gives you information, we always understood that this is the time when you need to be committed to a mental institution.
With chatbots this distinction got lost, and people started behaving as if it’s actually sentient. It’s not a metaphor anymore. This is a problem, even if it’s not the problem.
I think this confuses the ‘it’s a person’ metaphor with the ‘it wants something’ metaphor, and the two are meaningfully distinct. The use of agent here in this thread is not in the sense of “it is my friend and deserves a luxury bath”, it’s in the sense of “this is a hard to predict system performing tasks to optimize something”.
It’s the kind of metaphor we’ve allowed in scientific teaching and discourse for centuries (think: “gravity wants all master smashed together”). I think it’s use is correct here.