By Angeliki Agape Volandes, Assistant Opinions Editor |

When AI makes a mistake, a person is almost always responsible. “The computer did it” is the newest lazy excuse. Unfortunately, that excuse already has a track record. A California lawyer tried it in 2025 after filing a court brief built on cases that did not exist—all of them invented by ChatGPT. A court found that 21 of the 23 quotes in his brief were fabricated. His defense was that he never read what the program produced before sending it in. The judge was unmoved and fined him $10,000. Reading the work had been his job, and the tool’s failure did not erase that. 

The stakes climb from there. In 2020, Robert Williams was handcuffed in front of his children for a crime he did not commit after a facial recognition system wrongly matched his face to a shoplifter’s. Mr. William’s predicament was not an isolated incident either. At least seven people, nearly all of them Black, have been wrongfully arrested in the United States after a false facial recognition match. Yes, the software was wrong, but software does not make an arrest. An officer chose to trust the match and skip the investigation that would have cleared an innocent man. Caroline Wellington ’28 commented, “I find it really saddening to hear about AI’s impacts on people, which for some includes destroying their lives.” 

The pattern is the same each time: one excuse, wildly different consequences, one underlying problem. To be fair, there is a harder case. Sometimes AI does something so unexpected that no person could have predicted or prevented, and pinning the blame on a human feels wrong, such as the Flash Crash of the British Pound in 2010, when a series of algorithmic mistakes caused the currency’s value to drop by 6 percent. That kind of mistake is real but rare. The headlines are almost always about something far more ordinary: a person used the tool to save time and never checked what it handed back. 

Almost no one says “the AI did it” out loud—it sounds too much like a confession. Instead, the defense comes dressed up: I didn’t know, I didn’t realize, the tool messed up. But underneath, it is the same plea: don’t blame me, blame the machine. Talia Ziblatt ’27 says, “I’m a believer in accountability when it comes to using AI—those who use it have to bear the consequences of their actions. They were the ones typing the prompt into the chatbot; they were the ones passing its work off as their own, with or without mistakes.”  The stakes at school are smaller, but the principle is the same there as it is anywhere else. Whoever takes the credit when AI works takes the blame when it doesn’t.