Talk to My Agent

With Opening Day upon us, it seems like a reasonable time to go over the lineup: Who’s on first, What’s on second, and I Don’t Know is on third. While that old Abbott and Costello routine has been around for nearly a century, the questions it poses are more timely than ever in our AI-driven world, when we frequently don’t know who or what we’re talking to. The latest tech craze is AI agents that are being used to manage tasks previously completed by you. The more you use the agent, the more it knows about you, and the more it can be deployed to act on your behalf. Which leads us to a headline like this from the NYT (Gift Article): Sorry, Mom. You’re Chatting With an A.I. Agent, Not Your Son. “Will Laverty, 18, a software engineer who came to San Francisco from Australia a month ago, had a backlog of texts from friends and family asking what he had been up to in California. While it made him feel ‘kind of guilty,’ he put his parents in a group chat with his A.I. agent. ‘Pretty much all the things I wanted to tell them in my head, it already knew about from tracking everything about my life, and it could just tell them without me having to think.'”

+ In a world where AI can represent you, how will you be able to prove that you are really you? Just this month, Benjamin Netanyahu had to release a series of proof of life videos after an image that made it look like he had a sixth finger went viral. Many people are still convinced he’s dead. This represents a big problem for world leaders, but it also represents a big problem for everyone else. Experts are now recommending that you and your family members have a code word that you can use to prove you’re who you say you are. The BBC’s Thomas Germain decided to run a little test to see if he could prove he’s real. I tried to prove I’m not AI. My aunt wasn’t convinced. (Here’s a dead giveaway when it comes to my identity. If you contact me during tonight’s Giants-Yankees opening night game and I respond, it’s definitely AI.)