How much do you trust AI agents?
With the advent of clawdbots, it's as if we've all lost our inhibitions and "put our lives completely in their hands."
I'm all for delegating work, but not giving them too much personal/sensitive stuff to handle.
I certainly wouldn't trust something to the extent of providing:
access to personal finances and operations (maybe just setting aside an amount I'm willing to lose)
sensitive health and biometric information (can be easily misused)
confidential communication with key people (secret is secret)
Are there any tasks you wouldn't give AI agents or data you wouldn't allow them to access? What would that be?
Re. finances – Yesterday I read this news: Sapiom raises $15M to help AI agents buy their own tech tools – so this may be a new era when funds will go rather to Agents than to founders.
Replies
The main rule: anything that goes to the cloud stops being private. My approach is: agents are great, but only if they run locally (through Ollama or LM Studio). Yes, the model will be dumber than Claude or GPT-4, but at least I know my financial reports won’t leak into a training dataset. Trusting an API with bank account access without a "human in the loop" and strict limits is basically Russian roulette right now
minimalist phone: creating folders
@romanpetrov_pro I am standing for this as well (P.S. That's why I do not store anything important to me on Cloud) – on the other hand, I had to save my files and data from external disc so many times and it cost me so much money :DDD
As a data engineer, I think about this differently: it's not just about trusting the AI — it's about where your data goes when you use it. Most AI tools require uploading your files to their servers, and that's where the real trust question lies. I'd rather use tools that process data locally whenever possible. For repetitive data tasks (like reformatting spreadsheets), you don't even need AI — you need well-built deterministic tools. Not everything needs to be "smart" to be useful.
minimalist phone: creating folders
@daniil_bulgakov do you trust AI agents enough to run them on your computer? Or how is your stance between you and the usage?
@busmark_w_nika yep, running, but with guardrails and concrete goals.
You steering they and (if possible) make all their changes visible - like git diff for your files or other changes.
Hi Nika,
I also limit AI involvement in activities not related to personal sensitive areas.
The main risk in my opinion is AI use in countrie's attack/defense systems - mainly those with nuclear weapons. How far AI can interfere in this area - today and tomorrow?
minimalist phone: creating folders
@sergio_cavallante scary, but happy you mentioned that. I can see a possible threat esp. from China. But who knows... maybe another country will be fast enough (but hopefully, some sane people will not dare to harm).
This is quite literally why we built kwAI to enable people selling rather than let AI do the selling.
We let AI find, research, and draft the messages, while the human does the relationship building.
Very good mix.