AI will help our work and lives, but it's not a colleague or friend

Social media companies have taken zero responsibility to date for the social ills their tools have encouraged. But it’s not too late to put guardrails in place to keep social artificial intelligence (AI) companies from changing what it means to be human.

- Gary Bolles

First, there is no such thing as “an AI”. That’s a marketing label for a basket of technologies, one type of which is generative AI, of which one flavour is the Large Language Model, or LLM. By calling any piece of adaptive or autonomous software “an AI”, we simply sell tech companies’ products for them.

The idea of “AI employees” is also pure marketing because these are at best incomplete products; opaque attempts to sell more software. We should think of this category of software as “tool AI”, to remind us that — just like a pen or a cellphone - these are our tools, and certainly not the equals to humans in the workplace or in our lives.

In our personal lives, the marketing approach for these applications can be even more consequential. For example, Replika, a chatbot app, says its software is “the AI companion who cares”.

(Note the use of “who,” as if it were human, not “that”.)