Tech Site Criticizes AI Disclaimers of Big Tech Firm

Tech news site, Tomshardware, has criticised Artificial Intelligence (A.I) companies’ disclaimers that contradict their adverts and marketing strategy.

The critique came when Microsoft’s A. I tool Copilot’s Terms of Use was updated last October to state that the Large Language Model (LLM) is designed for entertainment use only; thus, users should not use it for important advice.

“While this may be a boilerplate disclaimer, it’s ironic given how hard the company wants people to use CoPilot for business uses and has integrated it into Windows 11,” said Tomshardware Tech writer, Jowi Morales.

Morales noted that several A.I tools like xAI, and Amazon have similar disclaimers. He, however, noted that while this may sound like common sense for people who know how LLMs work, there are, unfortunately, a whole lot of people who treat/believe AI output as the gospel, even those who are supposed to know better.

“We’ve seen this with Amazon’s services after some AWS outages were reportedly caused by an AI coding bot after engineers let it solve an issue without oversight. The Amazon website itself has also been hit with a few ‘high blast radius’ incidents that were linked to “Gen-AI assisted changes”, resulting in senior engineers being called up in a meeting to resolve the matter.

Morales continued, “While generative AI is a useful tool and can indeed increase productivity, it’s still just a tool that offers no accountability for any mistakes that it might make. Because of this, people who use it must always be careful to verify its output and double-check its results.

“But even when you are aware of the limitations of current AI technology, humans are susceptible to automation bias, wherein we tend to favour the results that machines produce and ignore data that might contradict that. AI could make this phenomenon more severe, especially as it can create results that look plausible or even true with a cursory glance.”

He noted that companies usually add such disclaimers to protect themselves from lawsuits, while pushing their AI services as the ultimate productivity hack, with the main goal of making money off customers to recoup the billions they’ve invested in hardware and talent.