Reading "AI" Gives Me Fatigue: A Manifesto
You already know what I mean, because you feel it too. Everyone and their grandma are saying those two letters out loud all the time. The connotations sprawl from exciting to dangerous, but I can't help but notice the dire phonaesthetic situation being imposed onto us. What I'm saying is: the acronym itself sounds spikey.
But we can't just refuse to talk about AI. Everyone has an opinion and rightly so. The rate of change this thing is responsible for has never been seen before. People have to talk about their livelihoods, people have to talk about their children's cognitive abilities and people have to talk about how tasks that used to be complicated are now so simple.
So we need a new name to be used by people like us: the ones who feel fatigued when hearing or reading "AI". The name can't too personified (Claude), because we're not dealing with a person. The name can't be too clunky (Chat GPT), because the words-opinions-meanderings we use either side need to be the focus. What we call it should represent how we feel about it. That is my manifesto.
On this blog, when I mention AI, I will refer to it as Cog. To me, Cog is helpful but inanimate and replaceable. Cog works hard for me on personal and professional tasks, but it will never write or proofread anything I publish here. This is how I'm trying my best to not make you feel fatigued when you visit this corner of the internet.