Imagine a day when someone makes decisions for you. Choosing a plane ticket, switching mobile plans, booking a hospital appointment, all done with a single word. When that entity making decisions on your behalf chooses wrong, who has to give their name at the refund counter. The promise to hand every citizen a free AI agent cannot become policy without passing through this question.
An agent is not a chatbot. It does not stop at telling you an answer, it is software that clicks, pays and completes applications on the user's behalf. The outcome the distribution policy aims at is clear. How many citizens have come to hold this tool.
Yet in the same week the free supply was announced, the Personal Information Protection Commission took issue with whether Naver's agent had properly offered users the option to refuse when their data was used. On one side distribution is being rushed, on the other the minimum conditions the distributed product must meet are being examined after the fact. It is a signal that the clock of policy and the clock of rules are out of step.
This article makes one argument. Adoption rates are not an outcome but a premise, and the urgent task is to fix in rules who answers for the decisions and transactions an agent carries out on someone's behalf, and how far users can reverse the personal data exchanged in that process. It is harder work than handing out tools, and it shows up less.
The counterargument is not weak. The worry is that drawing up rules first puts a frame on the technology before it has fully grown, and that foreign operators take the market in the meantime. There have in fact been cases where regulation ran ahead and only domestic operators were tied down. There is real ground behind the claim that distribution should be rushed and rules can follow.
Even so, agents have to be viewed differently. What this software does is not limited to displaying information, it is execution. A wrong summary can be filtered out by the user, but a wrong payment and a wrong contract agreement cost money and time to reverse. Distributing a tool that holds execution authority to the entire population belongs to the kind of thing that is far more expensive to fix later.
The outline of the rules needed is not complicated. What actions an agent can take without user confirmation, how liability is divided among developer, service provider and user when damage occurs, whether a user can refuse to have conversation and action records used for training and still use the service as before. Pointing out after the fact whether the refusal option actually works is too late.
It is better to be clear about what they cannot do as well. Today's agents cannot recognize on their own that they are wrong, and it is not rare for them to guess at a user's intent and arrive at the wrong action. Distribution will proceed even with these limits. If so, not promoting only the convenience while hiding the limits is the minimum courtesy.
The indicator that decides this policy's success or failure around this time next year will not be how many people received an agent. Does a user know where to call about a wrongly paid plane ticket, is there a way to confirm whether a request to exclude one's conversation records from training was actually reflected. Rules that can answer must be set up before distribution.
