AI Can’t Really ‘Go Rogue’

How journalists writing about AI can avoid hyping the supposed humanity of machines.

Q: I’ve heard that the Associated Press recently warned that journalists shouldn’t anthropomorphize AI and describe it as having humanlike characteristics. Why is this something to worry about, and what should I do instead?

A: When OpenAI’s hack of Hugging Face made headlines this summer, I was on vacation, preoccupied by a different set of rogue agents, my niblings. As I set down my things at the hotel, the elementary-age one with an iPad had already figured out how to connect to the Wi-Fi and started playing Roblox. I was perplexed; the kiddo stared at me blankly and let me know the secret, obtained thanks to a previous vacation: the internet password required only a last name and room number. Did this agent go “wild”? “Escape containment”? Attain “superintelligence”? No, it was just a child with good pattern-recognition skills and a ton of motivation.