Short version: "I’m going to embrace the term Artificial Intelligence and trust my readers to understand what I mean without assuming I’m talking about Skynet."
@simon the term "AI" deeply misleads laypeople into thinking sentient minds are at play, leading to all kinds of misuse/harm. I dont have to list links to all the damage "AI" has done so far due to people putting it in charge of things since "it's intelligent".
going to keep using technical terms like "machine learning" so that all the non-tech people I talk to understand a tech person like me does not consider this stuff to be "intelligent" in any way we usually define that term for humans
@simon less harm was done in 1955, 1960, 1970 etc. because we didn't have machines that were so singularly focused on pretending to be (confident, authoritative) humans at such massive scales, there was little chance of misunderstanding back then. now these machines have "I hope you misunderstand what I do" at their core
@zzzeek That's a very strong argument. I'm going to add a longer section about science fiction to my post, because that's the reason I held off on the term for so long too
@zzzeek Added that section here https://simonwillison.net/2024/Jan/7/call-it-ai/#argument-against
@simon just as the center of my assertion "I hope you misunderstand what I do", I would use the "AI Safety" letter as the prime example, of billionaires and billionaire-adjacent types declaring that this "AI" is so, so close to total sentience that governments *must* stop everyone (except us! who should be gatekeepers) from developing this *so very dangerous and powerful!* technology any further
lots of non-tech ppl signed onto that thing and it was quite alarming
@zzzeek urgh, yeah the thing where people are leaning into the science fiction definition to help promote the technology is really upsetting