AI says tomato but you mean potato
The fact that AI has become an inescapable component of daily discourse, news, and debate has been wreaking havoc on my sanity over the last year.
What’s become apparent is that by adopting the term AI, Sam Altman and his contemporaries have intentionally muddied the waters when it comes to what’s imagined vs what’s happening.
I am a bit of a stickler for definitions, mostly because if you want to socialise ideas, discuss them, and collaborate on them, you need to be on the same page. You need to have a shared understanding of what you’re attempting to discuss so that you don’t talk past each other, conflate ideas, or have clear boundaries for discussion.
That’s certainly what’s needed regarding AI because, right now, every discussion, think piece, critique, report, and press release has an entirely different interpretation of what AI is and what it means.
AI is used as a container word - a useful tool in language that captures a broader concept - like traffic. What is traffic exactly? You know it as a concept, but you can’t discuss traffic in and of itself - you have to break it down into the many things it contains – from cars, pedestrians, people movement, flow, signage, signals and infrastructure.
The difference between traffic and AI is that traffic has known components. The things the word contains are properly defined and can be discussed. That’s not the case with AI. What’s inside the container is an absolute mess of concepts and ideas that lack shared understanding and definitions.
What do you mean when you say AI?
Are you referencing Large Language Models? The software? Applications, Intelligence as a process or philosophy? Reasoning? Labour? Algorithms? Copyright? Machine learning? Hardware? Probability? Mathematics? Chat interfaces? Image recognition? All or none of the above? Do the people involved in the reporting, decisions and discussions about AI have any knowledge as to what any of these components are or what they mean?
The term AI has been colonised as an integral part of the hype cycle required for VC firms to dupe people out of their money and transfer more wealth to the 1%. AI as a concept has been enshittified right out of the gates. If we want to have proper conversations about it, we need to break away from the container and start talking about what’s inside, including the nuances and differences between the tomatoes and the potatoes. Because swapping out the tomatoes for potatoes in a recipe, despite the fact they sound similar, will give you very different results!