The importance of precise language in describing Artificial Intelligence
The eye of an alligator
A lot of people don’t really understand the process of evolution. They think they do — it seems a simple process — but when you discuss it with them, you realize that they actually have some fairly fundamental misunderstandings about it. That’s partly because it actually isn’t simple at all, it is very complex and many aspects of it require some considerable thinking to properly understand. Part of the problem, which is widely recognized by evolutionary biologists, is that it is hard to speak about evolutionary biology without using language that is misleading. Let’s look at an example:
The eye evolved to help animals see.
This seems a reasonable statement, right? Simple and clear. But it actually contains several aspects that are misleading, and in fact just plain wrong. Evolution is a non-directed, mechanistic process. The above statement implies that evolution works towards an end goal, in this case seeing. The fancy word for implying an end-goal is teleology. Evolution is not a teleological process. The statement also implies intentional design, as if evolution has agency and is actively trying to do something, in this case it is helping animals to see. Evolution doesn’t help, in the same way as gravity does not help a river go down a mountain.
So rather than “The eye evolved to help animals to see” what should we say instead? Ideally we would replace the language with another simple statement that gets rid of the misleading elements, but the problem for evolutionary biologists is that it’s actually extremely hard to do that. Here’s my attempt:
Over many generations, animals with mutations that slightly improved their ability to detect light, distinguish shapes, or sense motion were more likely to survive and reproduce. These small advantages — such as better predator detection, more effective foraging, or improved navigation — gradually accumulated through natural selection, eventually leading to the evolution of complex eyes capable of forming images.
Even reading this I can see it could potentially be misleading. I say “slightly improved” as if the animals were somehow better than previously, but that’s entirely dependent on the environment. Also this version doesn’t really get across the probabilistic/stochastic nature of the process of evolution very well. And saying that evolution is all about mutation is also misleading, a major component of evolution is actually about changes in existing gene frequency. But making it more accurate would make it even longer and less easily understood.
Anyway, my point is this—it’s hard to talk about evolution without being misleading. This is also true of Artificial Intelligence, and I think people in the field need to start worrying about language use in the same way as evolutionary biologists do. Even within published papers in the field of Artificial Intelligence it is common to come across language that implies agency on behalf of the model, or that anthropomorphizes them, or implies the model has sensory experience. This really needs to stop, because it is causing people outside the field to get very confused about what Large Language Models actually are. Let’s look at a little made-up example of a misleading statement about AI (I should really choose an example from a paper or article, but that would take a while and the dogs want a walk):
The AI understood the user’s question, decided that safety was the top priority, and tried to provide the most helpful answer.
How might this be better stated? Perhaps something like this:
The model generates a response that is statistically likely to follow the user’s input, based on patterns in its training data. Its outputs are shaped by optimization processes that favored responses aligned with safety and helpfulness signals.
Even the term “Artificial intelligence” is misleading. I much prefer “Simulated intelligence”, as it conveys that it is only a simulation of human intelligence. Anyway, my (very intelligent, highly agentic) Border Collie is pestering me for a walk.