Risk and safety

Excessive agency

Giving an AI system more permissions, tools or autonomy than its task needs, so a mistake or manipulation can do real damage. It is one of the risks in the OWASP Top 10 for LLM applications. The fix is least privilege and approval for consequential actions.


Related terms

AI incident

An event where an AI system causes or nearly causes harm, such as a chatbot giving customers wrong refund terms or an …

AI safety

The field concerned with preventing harm from AI systems, from everyday failures such as biased or false outputs to se…

AI text detector

A tool that claims to tell whether text was written by AI. They are unreliable: they produce false positives, particul…

Adversarial example

An input subtly altered to fool a model, such as an image with changes invisible to people that makes a classifier see…

Alignment

Making an AI system's behaviour match the intentions and values of the people it serves, including in situations its d…

Automation bias

The human tendency to over-trust an automated system's output and stop checking it, especially when it is usually righ…

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