That's because it's software / an application. I don't blame my editor for broken code either. You can't put blame on software itself, it just does what it's programmed to do.
But also, blameless culture is IMO important in software development. If a bug ends up in production, whose fault is it? The developer that wrote the code? The LLM that generated it? The reviewer that approved it? The product owner that decided a feature should be built? The tester that missed the bug? The engineering organization that has a gap in their CI?
Blameless culture is important for a lot of reasons, but many of them are human. LLMs are just tools. If one of the issues identified in a post-mortem is "using this particular tool is causing us problems", there's not a blameless culture out there that would say "We can't blame the tool..."; the action item is "Figure out how to improve/replace/remove the tool so it no longer contributes to problems."
Blame is purely social and purely human. “Blaming” a tool or process and root causing are functionally identical. Misattributing an outage to a single failure is certainly one way to fail to fix a process. Failing to identify faulty tools/ faulty applications is another way.
I was being flippant to say it’s never AI’s fault, but due to board/C-Suite pressure it’s harder than ever to point out the ways that AI makes processes more complex, harder to reason about, stochastic, and expensive. So we end up with problems that have to be attributed to something not AI.
> You can't put blame on software itself, it just does what it's programmed to do.
This isn't what AI enthusiasts say about AI though, they only bring that up when they get defensive but then go around and say it will totally replace software engineers and is not just a tool.
"I got rid of that machine saw. Every so often it made a cut that was slightly off line but it was hard to see. I might not find out until much later and then have to redo everything."
Designers, engineers, and/or pilots aren't tools, so that's a strange rhetorical question.
At any rate, it depends on the crash. The NTSB will investigate and release findings that very well may assign fault to the design of the plane and/or pilot or even tools the pilot was using, and will make recommendations about how to avoid a similar crash in the future, which could include discontinuing the use of certain tools.
If I bought an AI powered toaster that allows me to select a desired shade of toast, I select light golden brown, and it burns my toast, I certainly do blame “it”.
I wouldn’t throw it against a wall because I’m not a psychopath, but I would demand my money back.
I presume your definition of use case is something that doesn't include what people normally use it for. And I presume me using it for coding every day is disqualified as well.
I didn't mean to suggest it has no utility at all. That's obviously wrong (same for crypto). I meant a use case in line with the projections the companies have claimed (multiple trillions). Help with basic coding (of which efficiency gains are still speculative) is not a multi-trillion dollar business.
