Indexicals such as ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ are context-sensitive. Our everyday use of language is such that we find many examples where the reference of these indexicals shifts to something other than its standard interpretation in Kaplanian Semantics of Indexicals (Kaplan, 1989). This phenomenon has been called the Answering Machine Paradox (Sidelle, 1991). Philosophers up until very recently, have argued for some pragmatic solutions and semantic solutions to this problem in the logic of indexicals via both intention-based and non-intention-based approaches (Predelli, 1998, 2011; Mount, 2008, 2015; Sidelle, 1991; Dodd & Sweeney, 2010; Cohen, 2013; Briciu, 2018; Ciecierski & Rudnicki, 2023).

Drawing insights from this phenomenon of reference-shifting of indexicals in language and in the backdrop of an understanding of the concept of agency, we attempt to explore the issue of what can be called ‘shifted agency’ in the semantic sense in cases such as ‘Use me’ written on a bin (or by implication in AI systems like Alexa or Siri which also often make utterances using the indexical ‘I’ such as ‘I am here to help you’/ ‘I am sorry, I don’t know that one’). We do make sense of such utterances in a way that ‘me’ or ‘I’ refers to the object or the AI system respectively. In doing so, we don’t necessarily trace the agential perspective back to a human agent who composed the original message. The question that I attempt to raise here and provide a possible explanation of, is ‘How do we make sense of such usage of indexicals in a semantically correct way?’ I propose that one can recognise a shift in agency in the semantic sense such that the reference of indexicals is fixed in these cases and we can easily and intuitively make sense of such assertions as conveying relevant information.