I don't believe this aspect of AI is talked about often enough but in my opinion, it is the greatest threat of AI.
Organizations like the government will start programming AI to do X but the organization will tell everyone the AI is designed to do Y. When the AI does X, the organization will say it was a mistake, an accident and not what was intended because they intended for the AI to do Y. Everyone will believe the organization never intended X and the people who suggest the organization did indeed intend X will be branded a conspiracy theorist.
AI provides the ultimate scapegoat. It is able to make decisions and those decisions can be curated by the programmers despite acting as if the decision cannot be curated. In this way whomever designed the AI can always maintain whatever the AI ended up doing is not what they intended it for even if it is what they intended it for.
Lemme be Satan's lawyer for a bit here:
What is stopping these companies from just claiming this, when the most advanced AI they actually have is an excel spreadsheet? What purpose or necessity is there for an AI to actually be developed or exist for your fail-state situation to come true?
If I train a pug to do a nazi salute, I'm the one who'll get in trouble, not the pug. If I indoctrinate someone as a cult leader, I'm held attributable to at least some of their actions. The issue is the AI isn't advanced enough. Once it is to the intellect of a dog or a bird, we don't need to do an autopsy on a dog Roman saluting or a bird whistling Heit Ist Mein Tag to know the trainer is the one at fault, and held liable. Once AI reaches that point, we're free from this moral quandry, trainer is liable for what it has trained, so it makes sense to push forward with AI as strongly as possible until we're there.
We've normalized such a collectivist mindset among the general public that the idea of "the buck stops here" is falling by the wayside in favor of "systemic flaws" and "everyone holds some responsibility". I don't think any one person will be held responsible for the COVID19 scamdemic. Experts were just "following the science". We have people panicking that the planet is going to burn up because of predictive models. I can imagine a future where the models have been replaced with AI oracles that give suggestions, and they'll be right most of the time so people give their critical thinking and decision making over to those oracles. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
They are pushing AI as being more advanced than humans though. That's the danger. You're right, if AI is like a dog then everyone knows it's the owners fault. But what if AI is superior to a human, then how can you hold the human accountable since the AI did it completely independently of the human since the AI is advanced beyond humans?
That's what their aiming for. That's why there's such a push regarding how AI is smarter than humans. They're working to remove all the potential liability.
Just like how our masters use propaganda to impact how people behave but we still hold the individual people accountable rather than the ones who control the propaganda.
We do hold the ones "controlling the propaganda" responsible, at times. Like half of Trump's lawsuits and his team's lawsuits are over actions that other people did. And they make sure to let us know that those people, and other people, and various vegetables, are smarter than the people they're putting on trial.
The issue is we have no stability, no consistency, in our justice systems.