The trade-off for curiosity and choice is the lack of accountability that we foster with artificial intelligence
Lost your password? Please enter your username or email address. You will receive a link to create a new password via email.Freedom of choice over action and decisions, prompted by the influence of algorithmic biases, is under threat. Photo: Getty Images
Choice, in the form of curiosity-seeking, is presently being curated and influenced in ways that blurs the lines of what is true, what is right and what is good for us. In our quest for convenient, fast knowledge this has taken place under the guise of prompts — questions — that we ask AI to solve for us to satiate this curiosity.
Can we elect to use AI to do the right thing? If the right act, according to the Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy is meant to be the one that “yields the greatest moral value”, and not the one with the best consequences, does this then typify an exercise in rational choice? How AI tools are used and deployed inhabits an uncomfortable place of blurred lines coupled with an accountability vacuum. Like corruption, it is becoming increasingly evident that the deployment of AI involves the abuse of controlled power for private gain.
On Wednesday 14 May 2025, for a few hours, Grok allegedly malfunctioned. It spewed out unrelated and discordant commentary on white genocide. “… Grok has been repeatedly mentioning “white genocide” in South Africa in its responses to unrelated topics and telling users it was “instructed by my creators” to accept the genocide as “real and racially motivated”. Seeheadlined: “Musk’s AI Grok bot rants out ‘white genocide’ in South Africa in unrelated chats”.
Grok’s function was attended to within a few hours and the answers mentioning “white genocide” wereBut what of accountability? Mostly deleted implies, rather troublingly, that a new archive of information built on intentional misinformation has been set in motion to disrupt existing knowledge sets and designed to curate lived reality with a new AI-learned one. Will this archive on misinformation rear its head in the future to malfluence curiosity-seeking humans? Time will tell.
If hallucination is the name given for untrue, fictional pieces of knowledge created by AI, what would be the name for a similar error in judgment on the part of a killer robot? Time will tell.A Hazard to Human Rights highlights the legal challenges of accountability with killer robots. At present, it states there is no civil or international remedy for holding the operators of killer robots, or the programmers or designers, accountable for errors in digital decision-making.
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