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The declining potential for agency with LLMs

It’s fascinating watching Ethan Mollick get gradually depilled as each successive generation of frontier models minimises the potential role for human agency:

Importantly, it was just limited in how much work I did relative to the model, it was also limited in how much control I had over how the model did things, why the model chose particular approaches, or even how in-depth its results would be. The details of the AI’s decision making are not shown to me, and the process would be too long to even be worth following. The map required the AI to make judgement calls about hundreds of little choices, and it just made them, without me understanding the choices or having a chance to weigh in. In many ways, it is miraculous (I can always ask for edits at the end) on the other, it turns AI into the ultimate black box.

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-it-feels-like-to-work-with-mythos

Last year I called this working with a wizard: you chant the spell and something happens. With Fable the spell has gotten powerful enough that I am no longer sure I am the wizard. I am closer to a patron. I describe what I want, I pay for it, and I judge the result. The conjuring happens somewhere I cannot watch, in hundreds of small choices I never get a vote on. The work has shifted from process to outcome. I no longer steer; I commission.

https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/what-it-feels-like-to-work-with-mythos

Honestly I guess I’m going through a similar process, with the exception that I was never as utopian about the underlying capabilities of the technology. But the process he describes here, which Milan Sturmer and I talk about as reducing the burden of articulation, should be seen as the key shift taking place in the models as they diffuse. It’s just not possible to exercise sustained agency over the emerging models in the way it was over say 2025 era Claude and ChatGPT models. This captures something very significant I think:

A patron commissions a single artist. Fable is closer to a whole studio, where I am the client who signs off on the final work without ever setting foot on the floor.

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