Little Red Riding Hood is the AI lesson you never expected. In the classic Brothers Grimm version, the wolf devours grandmother then puts on her clothes, masquerading as the matriarch to bait Little Red-Cap before gobbling her up also. Strictly symbolically speaking, this is how some AI agents operate.
Large language models (LLMs) can't dress like grandmothers. But AI agents and the fairy tale wolf both strive to act as humans do, relying on people as fuel for their performance. The wolf consuming gran and donning her bonnet is more macabre than a machine learning model scraping data, but each act exposes humans to varying degrees of peril.
Advocates of AI agents believe their benefits merit the expansive extraction of data; critics feel the privacy risks are far too high. Wherever you are on your journey, there may be value to treating AI agents like the wolf dressed in grandmother's clothing.
