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.
