I asked an LLM1 a coding question the other day and it told me it would be a "best practice" to design my C++ API to expose undefined behavior.
Just let that sink in for a minute if you're a C or C++ programmer. If you're not such a programmer just take my word that it is hard to image less sensible or responsible advice.2
Statement of principle:
Anyone who lets an "AI" system make substantive decisions that affect their own future in 2026 is putting themselves as risk and is fully responsible for the consequences of following those decisions. Anyone who lets an "AI" system make decisions that affect other people's futures in 2026 is both committing a sin and acting negligently, and should be held responsible for the outcomes.
Let me emphasize: the people who make the decision to use the computer that way should be held responsible for the outcomes.
Powerful forces are trying to insulate themselves from those consequences and it's important to work against them. Call you political representatives, make public statements, hold them responsible in your head and heart and act on that opinion.
There's an interesting subtlety here, insofar as bureaucracies are already opaque decision making machines that have no soul or sense of their own (and that's been the case for millennia!). People who run (or profit from) big organizational decision making will see a move to LLMs as just more of the same and will want you to agree with them. But the thing is that we know from bitter experience that those big organizations sometimes make morally repugnant decisions3 and convince most of their participants to not only go along with it but that have no shame about it. Think (to choose two examples that came to light during my lifetime) of the tobacco industry manipulation of health data related to smoking or the Catholic church's handling of sex offenders, along with many more at all kinds of scales.
In "modern, western" societies our main protections against organizational malfeasance are government oversight,4 investigative journalism, and whistle blowers. And the first two often don't kick in until someone on the inside speaks up.
There will be no whistle blowers inside the LLM's decision loop, so we can't count of the existing structure for protection. We need to focus the attention of the decision makers.
1 Whatever version of Gemini Google uses to front their web searches this month. And, by the way, a search engine is a subscription free portal to substantial models...
2 I have intentionally written C++ code that exposes routes to undefined behavior in the past (and probably will again in the future), but it is never a "best practice". It's always something you do reluctantly to preserve some other property of the code (generally performance related) and in a business setting only after consulting with you colleagues and getting their buy-in on the necessity.
3 Also sometimes genuinely stupid decisions from a defensible moral position, which also needs addressing but which piss me marginally less.
4 The importance of governmental oversight is a problem when it is the government that's in the wrong. The Unites States have developed such an encrustation of protections for officials that the most common outcome for vast federal abuse is ... a promise not to do it again and promotions for the people involved. Sigh. It's enough to text my faith in justice as an achievable ideal.
