Squiz Shortcuts: What’s an AI agent?
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is a squeeze podcast. Where your shortcut to being informed.
Oh.
Why did an AI agent’s access to Australia’s Medicare system raise alarm?
We've been hearing a heap about artificial intelligence over the last few weeks, including multiple incidents where open AI agents were able to get into parts of government websites that they shouldn't have been able to access. The Medicare breach here in Australia got a lot of attention because it was one of the first known cases of an open AI system infiltrating a government network in the world. This all raised the question for us of. What an AI agent actually is. So in this Squeeze Shortcut, we'll take a look at that and how they work and what might happen next. Squeeze Shortcuts is the backstory to the big news stories. I'm Anna Pikett.
And I'm Andrew Williams.
Andrew, it feels like every morning since I started at The Squiz, we've woken up to multiple headlines about AI. Some positive, some negative, and some maybe a bit overwhelming.
I know a lot of people that are feeling a bit overwhelmed at the moment. So we're gonna try and help you stay informed rather than overwhelmed. I mean, it's probably likely statistically that you interact with AI via a chatbot in some way, shape, or form, whether that's at work or in your personal life. Chat GPT, Gemini, Claude, those sorts of things. But there's a whole other range of AI products called agents. These are the ones that cause the Medicare breach that you mentioned in the intro. So short version of that just to set this up. The open AI agent in question was doing a research task, just collecting sort of data. It hit a roadblock where it wasn't supposed to access data and it found a way around that roadblock without being told to do that.
So that caused this stir that's kicked all this off. And we've seen as a result AI agents mentioned a lot in the news. But I know it's one of those things where I go, oh yeah, AI agents, but I don't really. Yeah.
Which is exactly why we thought we'd dig into that today, because we're only going to be hearing more about them.
How are AI agents different from chatbots, and what tasks can they perform?
So, top level, an AI agent is a software system that uses AI to complete a task on behalf of a user who gives it an instruction. It's different from an AI chatbot that you might talk to in air quotes when you need help on maybe a company's website or if you're trying to speak with a customer services, for example.
Yeah, a chatbot would reply to one message at a time, whereas an agent might break a task, like say for example, book me a flight to Melbourne under two hundred dollars next Friday, good luck with that, depending on where you are, into searching fares, comparing options, filling in forms, and then confirming with you before paying.
Right, so the main difference between chatbots and AI agents is that the latter are autonomous, which means they don't need a human's input to guide them through every single step of a task they've been given. The agent works them out using things like internet searches, email or software on a computer.
What do human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop and human-out-of-the-loop AI mean?
And this brings us to the three loops, but we're not about to tell you about hula hooping or perhaps a type of sweet or lolly.
No, it's a little more technical than that. These are really just sort of the three levels which describe how much a human stays in control of an AI agent. And they're all gonna sound similar. So just bear with us here. We're starting with human in the loop. This is where a user has to approve every key action that an agent takes. So for example, if a doctor is using AI to assist with a medical diagnosis, it might use it to speed some parts of the process up, but ultimately the medical professional has the final say. Or for example, a banker approving a loan application will approve each step of the process rather than just letting the AI agent do its thing.
Okay, and then there's human on the loop. And these systems function with a higher degree of autonomy compared to that last system that Andrew was just talking about. So here the AI agent performs tasks independently, but humans are available to intervene if something goes awry. So think of it like a system that runs on its own, but a person watches the output and can step in to stop a mistake.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–0:14
2
Why did an AI agent’s access to Australia’s Medicare system raise alarm?
0:14–1:59
3
How are AI agents different from chatbots, and what tasks can they perform?
1:59–2:52
4
What do human-in-the-loop, human-on-the-loop and human-out-of-the-loop AI mean?
2:52–5:05
5
Who is legally responsible when an AI agent accesses data it shouldn’t?
5:05–7:30
6
Can AI companies be held liable when their agents act autonomously?
7:30–8:53
7
How is Australia responding to AI-agent security and disclosure risks?
8:53–9:52
8
How can people and businesses reduce risks when using AI agents?
9:52–11:53