Agency in the Age of AI
It addresses concerns about AI misuse and societal harm for researchers and policymakers, but is incremental as it builds on existing discourse without introducing new empirical results.
The paper tackles the societal impacts of generative AI by proposing agency as a key lens for analyzing harms and benefits, arguing that this requires advancements in both theoretical frameworks and agent-based modeling applications.
There is significant concern about the impact of generative AI on society. Modern AI tools are capable of generating ever more realistic text, images, and videos, and functional code, from minimal prompts. Accompanying this rise in ability and usability, there is increasing alarm about the misuses to which these tools can be put, and the intentional and unintentional harms to individuals and society that may result. In this paper, we argue that \emph{agency} is the appropriate lens to study these harms and benefits, but that doing so will require advancement in the theory of agency, and advancement in how this theory is applied in (agent-based) models.