I've been thinking about the new Associated Press guidelines to avoid referring to #AI in ways that could imply humanness, sentience, or intent:
Don't say, "It WANTS you to enter more information," for example.
I've often used that kind of wording for computers in the past.
But more precise wording matters now because it's the first time we've widely had systems that could be mistaken for being human or having sentience, and it's important not to reinforce that idea.
The "I" in AI stands for "intelligence".
I'm not buying into a game where others can use the word intelligence with all that implies to sell their snake-oil, but I'm not allowed to criticize it for doing the bad things intelligent things can do like lie, or cheat. If it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, you're justified in calling it a duck and treating it accordingly.
When a supposed AI glibly gives me a made-up answer because the real answer isn't in its corpus, as opposed to "I don't know" - that's a lie, kids.
The proponents *already* ascribe more power to AI than it deserves, unfortunately - with real world effects. People are losing their jobs because managers believe it can do things it can't.
"It's just a pattern-matching engine that emits plausible responses without any understanding of the meaning of the content" - while more accurate - doesn't communicate the point nearly as well as "it lies".
@Biggles That's an interesting point. To me, using words that make it seem human, like "lie" and "hallucinate," ascribe more power to it than it has and contributes to the marketing that causes some people to mistakenly believe it is sentient.
But words have all kinds of power and I can see why you think "It gives wrong answers," or "You absolutely can't rely on it for facts," aren't as strong as "It lies."