No, it isn't. The term “artificial intelligence” frames and shapes how people think about the field by assuming answers to some of the most controversial philosophical and practical debates about what the technology is capable of.

These days, the term “AI” is commonly used to describe a comparatively new (and effective) approach to ML that is based on Large Language Models (LLMs)

From a philosophical and ethical point of view, conflating “AI” and “LLMs” anthropomorphizes what is actually an enormous statistical model.

This anthropomorphism, in turn, shapes the public's understanding of the technology and leads people to conclude that LLMs have “intentionality” when, in reality, they are parroting the intentionality of the people who wrote the content the LMM was trained on.

This isn’t just abstract nitpicking.

The real-world ethical impact of this kind of conflation is the difference between the public understanding of so-called “AI-based predictive police” tools as being:


- Intelligent
- A massive database of encoded historical patterns and the biases those patterns reflect