Stanford University researchers are warning in a new paper that an AI agent carrying out tasks like booking travel and filling shopping carts may be working on a different agenda: serving the developer who created it.
As these AI-assisted helpers go about their business, they may access personal data and all sorts of information about a user, and the risk is that the agents might then piece it together for "entirely unrelated tasks," according to the paper.
Such a scenario could represent the AI-era incarnation of social-media platforms' use of customer data for their own business purposes, such as marketing and targeted ads.
"Agents risk becoming extensions of platforms that prioritize corporate gain over the best interests of their users," according to researchers Ella Genasci Smith, Victor Y. Wu and Jennifer King in a policy brief for the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI.
The authors argue that developers and deployers selling agents to consumers should carry a fiduciary duty to those users. They also want verifiable digital identifiers for agents, federal privacy legislation and mandatory reporting to the Federal Trade Commission when an agent goes off script.
The decentralized AI angle: Many blockchain projects say they're building solutions to address privacy concerns in AI, in some cases using advanced cryptography to keep user queries unreadable when they get sent for processing.
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