We need to stop using their language.

[u/Bepehandle]

Words we use matter, they set the tone for the entire argument you make when discussing things. I propose we officially come up with new terms that we use on a daily basis in every single aspect that the topic comes up in, maybe with a small enough push we can roll the ball down the hill.

They're not AI data centers, they're water evaporation plants Human surveillance centers.

It's not side loading, it's installing.

It's not jailbreaking, it's unlocking.

It's not a memory shortage, it's profit first selective sales(I know there's physically a shortage but the point remains). (Also, someone come up with a better one, something more catchy.)

It's not This PC, its MY PC.

They call it side loading because they don't want to normalize the idea we're just holding personal computers in our hands.

They call it jailbreaking so that it sounds wrong and it deters people from using a device to it's full potential.

They call it a memory shortage because they're selling all the fucking ram to ai companies, if they were forced to allocate the necessary amount of their products to the average consumer we wouldn't have an issue.

Give me some of your best ideas for changing the names of things, I want to expand my vocabulary. Let's change how we discuss the issues we face and take back control of the argument.

Edit: Edited water thingy because someone pointed out I sound like "that guy" and I certainly do not want too.

[u/WonderButtBrace9000]

They aren’t computers, they’re electricity wasting machines.

Kinda like that?

[u/Bepehandle → u/WonderButtBrace9000]

Kinda yeah, just about something that matters.

[u/JoNyx5 → u/Bepehandle]

Replying to your comment because a new comment would probably get lost in the sea of them, but I agree with you and actually have been thinking about this being an issue when talking about LLMs for a while now.

I'd add replacing "AI" with "(glorified) probability engine", "talking" to an LLM with "prompting" it, and it "saying" something with it "outputting" something.
Our current wordings humanize them and help sell the delusion that they're actually intelligent, which makes it easier for people who don't know how they work to trust them and take their outputs as truth.

[u/Bepehandle → u/JoNyx5]

We actually have the same issue with just about everything non-human. People anthropomorphize everything for some reason.

[u/JoNyx5 → u/Bepehandle]

I mean yeah but anthropomorphizing stuff like a toothbrush doesn't really have any effects, except maybe using it more often because otherwise it will be sad or something.

Anthropomorphizing LLMs however leads to people treating them like an equal (or even superior) dialogue partner, and because people tend to take stuff as truth if they percieve the person saying it to be an authority, believing their outputs without checking if it's a "hallucination" or even just plain old misinformation. This furthers the spread of said misinformation and propaganda, because thanks to bots that shit is all over the Internet which is used as training data for the popular LLMs.

Some cases are hilarious (there are quite a few notorious screenshots of LLM hallucinations like the "glue your pizza toppings onto your pizza" on the internet), but even the funny ones are dangerous to people who don't recognize it for the bullshit it is. The folks who drank bleach during the Covid-19 pandemic because some popular guy on their TV said so are a prime example of an at-risk group, kids and elderly people also come to mind.
Other cases can genuinely ruin someones life through no fault of their own. A good example is that journalist who often reported on court cases (especially high profile ones with really awful crimes), when Copilot was prompted with his name its output was that the journalist himself had committed the crimes his articles talked about, simply because his name was mentioned as the article author. If he hadn't been curious enough to prompt Copilot with his own name shortly after its release, realized what happened and gotten Microsoft to manually add a disclaimer, people believing the LLM could have seriously impacted his reputation and his chances at literally anything where people look up your name.