AI has introduced a new lexicon of strange terms

While we make our peace with it, AI has also brought in a whole new, fast-growing language. Never-heard-before terms are entering our vocabulary, even though few of us really understand what they mean or imply. There’s nothing for it but to make an acquaintance with this word salad.

People have become so obsessed with prompts, they go collecting them online, wherever anyone cares to share them. This makes them ‘prompt goblins'. The practice really grew when ChatGPT came up with Studio Ghibli-style images. Gemini’s Nano Banana took over in more recent days. There are actually ‘promptfluencers’ who have become known for making it easier for everyone else by letting them copy and paste their prompts.

I just take the easy way out and ask the chat assistant to write the prompt for itself and then feed it back to it in a fresh chat. It seems quite happy to oblige.

It’s interesting to pause and ponder the power of the prompt, though. It’s gone from being a nudge to becoming an instruction that can unfold an entire product. The other day, I decided to track my indisciplined meal timings. Do I really eat lunch at 3pm and dinner at 11pm that often? I asked Gemini, with a single-sentence prompt, to create an app to track meal timings. In seconds, I had an app that lets me just tap to record timing just before each meal. And yes, my meal timings are definitely in need of taming.

Agentic systems can be very capable, running a ‘multi-step task execution’, an entire chain of actions including detecting a problem, gathering information, and carrying out an entire process. When there’s no ‘human in the loop’, one presumes these systems will do whatever they choose to, whether we like it or not, unless we put in ‘guardrails’ and ‘safety specs’ in a big hurry.

Agentic AI opens up the doors to plenty of dangers, not that we’re short of them already. A bad actor can hijack a process by inserting a ‘prompt injection’, causing chaos and compromising our security and privacy. It’s such a frightening scenario that people have given over to ‘doomscrolling’, the term used for compulsively exploring scary AI scenarios, news, and predictions.

I notice the most dire scenarios often come from the CEOs of the very companies that are making AI what it is, which is rather ironic. Sundar Pichai was asked in an interview whether AI could threaten all jobs, including CEOs. He said the role of a CEO might be one of the easier things for an AI to do someday. Sam Altman of OpenAI joked that he would be “nothing but enthusiastic” if AI someday ran his company better than he could.

Cloning a voice has been shockingly easy to do for quite some time now. Some years ago, I came across Lyrebird.ai online, which invited you to clone your voice with a small sample, though a more extensive one would have better results, obviously. I tried it out, reading samples of text given. I was soon able to type in any sentence and have it spoken out in what seemed like my own voice, complete with inflexions and intonations. I managed to fool a few friends with it, too.

There’s a whole dictionary of terms developing as fast as the AI, but one thing it’s all given rise to is ‘reality confusion’. It’s that very familiar state when we can’t tell the difference between AI and reality.

The New Normal: The world is at an inflexion point. Artificial intelligence (AI) is set to be as massive a revolution as the Internet has been. The option to just stay away from AI will not be available to most people, as all the tech we use takes the AI route. This column series introduces AI to the non-techie in an easy and relatable way, aiming to demystify and help a user to actually put the technology to good use in everyday life.

Mala Bhargava is most often described as a ‘veteran’ writer who has contributed to several publications in India since 1995. Her domain is personal tech, and she writes to simplify and demystify technology for a non-techie audience.