alt Hacker NewsThis distinction is silly.
We say "Google's web crawlers scape web pages." We don't insist you say "Google uses web crawlers to scrape web pages."
We describe software as having agency all the time. It's typical usage and it's efficient and it's well understood.
And we don't get angry when they're used interchangeably.
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I would agree with you generally, but in this particular case, the distinction seems important because a significant percentage of the world population believes that agents can be self-aware, a-là Terminator etc.
I very much say "Google uses web crawlers to scrape web pages." and if something breaks, or some data is stolen, everyone else is going to be saying that Google has to take responsibility.
oh we do! At least they google is quite good at adhering to robots.txt.
Google's web crawlers are automated and that's part of their business practice.
The attack here is neither of those things.
In this case, who holds the agency is exactly the point. Anthropic and OAI are claiming we need protection from AI itself, but the statement supported by putting agency in the right place is that we need protection from them.