Alli Adams
Editor’s Note: All opinion section content reflects the views of the individual author only and does not represent a stance taken by The Collegian or its editorial board.
The truth about artificial intelligence is surprisingly simple: We don’t fully understand it — not the casual user typing into a chatbot, not the companies racing to commercialize it and, yes, not even the engineers who spend their lives building it.
The deeper you go, the more obvious it becomes that we are steering a machine no one can fully predict. That makes the question of responsibility far more complicated than anyone wants to admit.
AI systems make mistakes, sometimes big ones. They misinterpret context, generate incorrect information or behave in ways that don’t fully align with pretty standard human values. So when it fails, who’s to blame? The people who built a system they can’t fully control, or the people who trust that system as if it’s incapable of being wrong?
“And unless we slow down long enough to actually catch up with the tools we’ve built, the biggest risk isn’t the mistakes AI makes; it’s our willingness to act like it can’t make any.”
The uncomfortable answer is that both people are to blame. No matter how polished its interfaces may look, AI is still very much experimental. We essentially live inside a global beta test, one where the technology evolves faster than we can study, regulate or even fully comprehend it.
And then there’s the huge mess underneath it all: intellectual property. Modern AI is trained on mountains of human work, much of it scraped without permission. This isn’t just a legal gray zone; it’s an ethical minefield. When a machine absorbs billions of creative decisions, who owns what comes out on the other side? As of right now, nobody can answer that clearly.
Developers keep pushing boundaries they barely understand. Companies chase scale, and regulators chase them, always one step behind. Every player is guessing — some with more confidence than others — about a system evolving so fast that certainty can’t keep up. That’s why assigning blame feels so impossible: We are all operating inside the unknown.
AI will keep getting things wrong — not because it’s malicious, but because we still haven’t figured out where its boundaries actually are. And unless we slow down long enough to actually catch up with the tools we’ve built, the biggest risk isn’t the mistakes AI makes; it’s our willingness to act like it can’t make any. The real danger shows up when we treat its answers as facts and when we trust the tone instead of the truth. AI errors matter, sure — but our blind faith matters more.
So who’s responsible when it goes wrong? We are — not the algorithms, not the abstractions, but rather people. The builders who release it. The companies that deploy it. The users who lean on it without question. The institutions that hesitate to regulate it.
AI isn’t shaping the world: people are. The definitive truth is that the consequences of artificial intelligence will always fall on the humans who chose to build it, use it and believe in it.
Reach Gigi Young at letters@collegian.com or on social media @RMCollegian.