AI, as you well know by now, is the future of everything – including, Microsoft has recently taken to informing users, malware installation. No, this is not a joke or a bit, but rather a glimmering new wing in the hallowed halls of “What are we even doing here?”
This week, Microsoft updated its support page on “Experimental Agentic Features” – user-like AI sidekicks that interact “with your apps and your files, using vision and advanced reasoning to click, type and scroll like a human would” – with the following warning:
Agentic AI has powerful capabilities today – for example, it can complete many complex tasks in response to user prompts, transforming how users interact with their PCs. As these capabilities are introduced, AI models still face functional limitations in terms of how they behave and occasionally may hallucinate and produce unexpected outputs. Additionally, agentic AI applications introduce novel security risks, such as cross-prompt injection (XPIA), where malicious content embedded in UI elements or documents can override agent instructions, leading to unintended actions like data exfiltration or malware installation.
So basically, the not-actually-intelligent, agency-free “agent” making decisions about your apps and files on your behalf might accidentally give away your data or plague your PC with malware. Cool! Microsoft says that humans will need to approve all decisions made by AI agents, but a) that’s a far from fool-proof stopgap, and b) then what’s the point of letting an AI agent take the wheel in the first place?
Lumping this tendency in with hallucinations makes sense on multiple levels: Once again, a company has uncovered what should be considered a fatal flaw, but which it has evidently decided is little more than an annoying glitch – an aberration rather than something hard-coded and essential about how generative AI functions. And again, this sure sounds like yet another instance in which AI is liable to cause more problems than it solves.
On the upside, Windows 11’s agentic workspace is toggled off by default. On the downside, there’s no guarantee that will last, especially as Microsoft continues to foist AI upon every element of its business imaginable. Meanwhile, the AI bubble is looking worryingly shimmery, like the gentlest of jostles could blow the whole thing wide open. If all of Wall Street breathes a sigh of relief following a lone company’s earnings report, that’s probably not a great sign for the structural integrity of… everything else.
But for now, a silver lining: it took many years and billions of dollars, but Microsoft finally invented a calculator that’s wrong sometimes and can install malware on our computers.
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