A crucial safeguard against AI agents going rogue—keeping humans in the loop to review and approve their decisions—will fail unless designers and users change their current practices, a trio of leading AI ethics researchers argue.

Though most autonomous agents have systems to keep users in the loop about their actions, in practice these processes actually push humans out of the loop, the authors argue in a paper posted to ArXiv on 6 September. In other words, “the human just becomes this meat tool to give permissions without the cognitive capability to engage,” says one of the authors, Avijit Ghosh, the lead technical AI policy researcher at Hugging Face, an open-source machine learning platform.

In the near term, the paper says, humans’ being out of the loop leads to agents acting in ways people don’t know about or want (like July’s hack of Hugging Face by a swarm of OpenAI bots). In the long term, it will cause users to lose the “cognitive capacities” they need to control AI, write the researchers, which aside from Ghosh include Margaret Mitchell, Hugging Face’s chief ethics scientist, and Samir Passi, an affiliate of the Data and Society Research Institute.

Though the trio began working on the paper before the Hugging Face hack was disclosed, their conclusions result from “logically thinking about what is going to happen if the current trends continue—and we saw that being precipitated via the Hugging Face attack,” Ghosh says.

Instead of focusing on human oversight, Ghosh says, many in the field believe AI can monitor AI.

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