In our op-ed for Tech Policy Press (“We Need to Talk About How We Talk About ‘AI’”), we made the case against the anthropomorphizing language that makes it harder to have clear discussions of what so-called “AI” technologies actually do, and when and whether to use them. But these ways of speaking are deeply ingrained at this point, and it takes work carve new conversational and writing habits. That work involves at least three steps:
- Noticing which word choices are anthropomorphizing
- Finding alternatives
- Getting in the habit of using the alternatives
I absolutely agree. This will change nothing at best, and come across as sanctimonious BS that drives people away from what you’re trying to say at worst. Whatever problems exist with ai, they come from funding models, incentives, negative externalities (power, water), inequity (pay to play, unauthorized use of training data), and the way they allow the least moral among us to poison the commons with unprecedented speed and efficiency.
Very little of this is affected by what we call it.