[AnimalMuppet]

Interesting. The best agents don't have agency, or at least don't use it.

You can think of this in video game terms: Players have agency. NPCs are "agencs", but don't have agency. But they're still not just objects in the game - they can move themselves and react to their environment.

[minasmorath]

That's actually a great example of what I'm saying, because I don't think the NPCs are agents at all in the traditional sense of "One that acts or has the power or authority to act on behalf of another." Where would the NPC derive its power and authority from? There is a human somewhere in the chain giving it 100% of its parameters, and that human is ultimately 100% responsible for the configuration of the NPC, which is why we don't blame the NPC in the game for behaving in a buggy way, we blame the devs. To say the NPC has agency puts some level of metaphysical responsibility about decision making and culpability on the thing that it doesn't have.

An AI "agent" is the same way, it is not culpable for its actions, the humans who set it up are, but we're leading people to believe that if the AI goes off script then the AI is somehow responsible for its own actions, which is simply not true. These are not autonomous beings, they're technology products.