Words to Use Carefully
This page exists to try and collect the words people/companies use that are either of poor form or used to trick people into thinking something else.
I’ll update this occasionally - see the bottom of the page for when it was last updated.
AI
“AI” is an umbrella term for many forms of artificial intelligence. The type that we “didn’t have” before ChatGPT is called a Large Language Model. It’s debatable whether LLMs and other types of generative AI are worth the £££ that are being injected into them (with virtually 0 profit), and are definitely less useful than other kinds. If types of AI were different vehicles, LLMs would come under “hoverboard with rocket boosters”.
If you use LLMs, consider if there is another way of completing your tasks without using them. You may find it is more reliable, quicker or cheaper.
Claude
Claude (by anthropic) was probably deliberately named so people would use human-like pronouns. You can use whatever pronouns you like, because it will never know, but I suggest using it/its because it is not a human.
While we are on this subject, am I the only one who finds the manufactured friendliness of LLMs really egregious?
Customer
Try and use a more specfic term like guest, visitor, passenger, etc. People need to be valued more than how much money they are willing to spend.
The same goes for “content” or “proudct”.
To “google” means to use the Google search engine. If you used DuckDuckGo, Yandex, Startpage or a SearxNG instance then you simply haven’t “googled” anything at all - but you have searched for something.
Hallucination
People use this to describe when their “AI” gets things wrong.
If “hallucinations” are unacceptable, why not use the terms “wrong”, “faulty” or “incorrect” instead? Just because something is branded as an AI thing doesn’t mean it can get away with not working.
Meta, X
Admittedly the term “meta” describes the company better as an entity with no benefit to society, but acknowledging the rename of a company you don’t like is a win for them.
So, make sure to say Instagram is owned by Facebook and that people are being recorded by the Facebook glasses.
Sick
Please don’t use sick as a synonym for “mentally ill”, it is very primitive and Trump uses it a lot.