Choice of Words
When I was a teenager, I would often seek my dad's help to review my essays to open-ended questions, like those in a college admissions essay. All reviews were helpful in improving my essays because my dad could share with me tidbits of wisdom thanks to his many more years of experience, and his vast and broad subject matter expertise. Many years later, I came to realize that one lesson he taught me was the value of diction: our choice of words in communication.
One especially memorable review experience was a disagreement my dad and I had. He asked me how I arrived at a certain conclusion, and I responded along the lines of, "I spoke to a friend". He then followed up and asked, "Did you speak or did you message your friend?". At that point, I realized that a better choice of words as compared to 'spoke to' would have been 'messaged' or 'communicated with' or 'learned from'.
Since then, I have become more mindful of the mapping between 'words' and 'concepts'. Based on the current state of the world, the relevance of this mapping may be increasingly important. With folks increasing their usage of AI-powered information retrieval chat tools such as Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, we may see more folks mapping the word 'talk' to the experience of using a state-of-the-art knowledge work tool.
Differences in mapping between people are common. For instance, in the realm of investing, I may say that an investment is 'good' if there is a possibility of a 100% return with up to 20% loss over 3 years. At the same time, my degenerate capital allocator friend may say that 'good' means that there is a possibility of a >1000% return with up to 100% loss using 10x leverage over 7 days. Between two friends, 'good' demonstrably maps to very different concepts.
Although common, differences in mapping can result in differences in approaches. Returning to the example above, the two friends will inevitably create different 'good' investment candidate options. While I may add $ADSTOKEN to my candidate options list, my friend may add $SCAMCOIN22 to his list.
Applying this concept of difference in approaches people 'talk'ing with Google's Gemini, OpenAI's ChatGPT or Anthropic's Claude, there are already a group of people that choose 'talk' to describe a person-to-person-like discussion with an AI-powered information retrieval chat tool. As a result, there is a short-term possibility that a group of people using this mapping personify a program. Moreover, there is a pernicious, long-term possibility that the same group of people conflate a program personality and a person which could, in a worst case scenario, result in a prioritization of program personalities over people.
Looking back to the essay review sessions with my dad, he most importantly imparted to me the importance of clarity in thought. So at least in my experiences, I 'talk' to people like my dad or my degenerate capital allocator friend, and I 'use' AI-powered information retrieval chat tools3. With this choice in wording, this small act of precision may serve as a major distinction between the importance of people and the utility of tools.