Kyle Kingsbury on Human Accountability as 'Meat Shields' for AI Systems

Summary

Simon Willison highlights a quote from Kyle Kingsbury (known as Aphyr, widely respected in distributed systems) from his post 'The Future of Everything Is Lies, I Guess: New Jobs.' Kingsbury describes an emerging pattern where humans are employed — sometimes implicitly — as 'meat shields' who bear accountability for AI/ML systems under their supervision. He cites examples ranging from Meta's human reviewers of automated moderation decisions to lawyers penalized for submitting LLM-generated false