The most dangerous thing about artificial intelligence, according to Meredith Whittaker, is careless use by people who don’t understand it. The ghost stories are a distraction. The ghosts are not the problem. The people holding the séance kit are.
Whittaker told the BBC that the technology has been misunderstood. She may be right, and the misunderstanding is running in both directions at full volume.
On one side, the doomsayers have turned every chatbot into a sentient poltergeist waiting to switch off the grid. On the other, the boosters have turned every autocomplete update into a spiritual awakening with a Series B.
Every new feature now arrives with a spooky codename and a press release that calls it transformative. The product is a text box that occasionally invents citations. The launch video has a haunted-house soundtrack and a founder walking through fog.
Is anyone checking what these things actually do before they touch payroll, medical notes or a courtroom? Mostly no. The careful part was scheduled for after the demo.
The ghost is not in the machine. The ghost is the quarterly roadmap, which has been promising to be ‘agentic’ since Tuesday.