Practical follow-up from Emily M. Bender & Nanna Inie (Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000) on how to talk about "AI" without feeding the anthropomorphization: name the actual system instead of "AI", hand agency back to people ("students used ChatGPT", not "ChatGPT assisted students"), and swap loaded terms for plain ones — hallucination → "undesirable output", neural networks → "weighted networks", AI agents → "probabilistic, unverified software manipulators".
[...] We encourage you to try out the above rephrasings and to create some of your own in the same spirit! It can feel awkward at first, but in our experience it is easier than reliably pronouncing or spelling the word anthropomorphization, so there is that.
https://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-talk-about-ai-without-adding-to-the/
#ai #LLM #aicon #anthropomorphization
oatmeal
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2026-09-23 11:44:31 UTC
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"content": "Practical follow-up from Emily M. Bender \u0026 Nanna Inie (Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000) on how to talk about \"AI\" without feeding the anthropomorphization: name the actual system instead of \"AI\", hand agency back to people (\"students used ChatGPT\", not \"ChatGPT assisted students\"), and swap loaded terms for plain ones — hallucination → \"undesirable output\", neural networks → \"weighted networks\", AI agents → \"probabilistic, unverified software manipulators\". \n\n[...] We encourage you to try out the above rephrasings and to create some of your own in the same spirit! It can feel awkward at first, but in our experience it is easier than reliably pronouncing or spelling the word anthropomorphization, so there is that.\n\nhttps://buttondown.com/maiht3k/archive/how-to-talk-about-ai-without-adding-to-the/\n\n#ai #LLM #aicon #anthropomorphization",
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