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Emily M. Bender and Nanna Inie In our op-ed for Tech Policy Press ("We Need to Talk About How We Talk About 'AI'"), we made the case against the...

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
  • KexPilot
    142·
    4 days ago

    I have to be honest, reading this article gave me a bit of a bad mouth taste, but let’s see if someone here in the comments sees it otherwise. We anthropomorphise so many things as part of language; not because we think they are human, but simply because it eases the use of language. When I say that a vending machine gave me an error code, I don’t literally mean that it handed something to me… Critisizing “AI” as a piece of terminology is not critisizing AI, it is critisizing natural language. Changing language around “probabilistic automation” (the proposed terminology to replace “AI”) will not change anything about the moral, ecologic and legal problems that people in this lemmy channel take issue with.

    • Rugnjr@lemmy.blahaj.zone
      3·
      2 days ago

      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.

    • HaraldvonBlauzahn@feddit.org
      11·
      2 days ago

      We anthropomorphise so many things as part of language; not because we think they are human, but simply because it eases the use of language.

      The point is attributing capabilities to algorithms which they are not capable of, like “reasoning” or “lying”. Such sloppy use of language affects negatively our ability to talk and think about reality.

      • KexPilot
        1·
        2 days ago

        Well, I see two categories of langague that are being taken under a single umbrella here:

        • Natural every-day language, to which my point still stands. “Lying” definitely falls into this category. I can only repeat here the above, we simply talk like this. You cannot expect human language to be 100% formal precise all the time in this sense.
        • More formal definitions. Yes, here I agree a bit that these should be as precise as possible. But when it comes to definitions, I also don’t think this is something that affects our ability to talk about it. When a paper or a dictionary defines what a term means, that’s the meaning we imply by using the term. Not the parts the term is made up from. There are plenty of latine names for animals and plants that we use, even though the individual parts of the name are not actually true about that animal and come from misdocumentation or a misconception. Nazis are not socialist, despite their name conatining the word. What I do agree with is that the imprecise naming might cause confusion when being new to the term, but once the talking and thinking starts, you would already be at a point where you know what the term means.