Please Stop Saying “AI”

by Dwayne Phillips

It seems that everyone wants to say or write AI or artificial intelligence these days. Please stop misusing the term.

Our Federal Trade Commission wants to regulate AI. The lack of literacy is astounding, but then again, this is the pinnacle of regulating instead of creating. The FTC, with all its good intentions, is not talking about AI. They are talking about noticing and marketing. Those are things that businesses have done since businesses were in business.

This is, “We noticed that you go to the grocery store on Tuesday, so we will send you a sale paper or email on Monday evening.”

Collecting the information (everyone calls it “data” nowadays) to notice when I go to the grocery store might be abusive. Then again, it might be helpful to me as well as to the folks running the grocery store (“here comes that old man who still uses cash”).

Of course, those folks who tend to abuse others might use all this to abuse others since that is the type of folks they are. That is a shame, but we have yet to figure out how to right laws that cause abusive folks to stop being abusive.

Funny, we haven’t mentioned AI in all this. I guess that is because AI has nothing to do with it. If you know anyone at the FTC, please mention this to them.