Struggling to put your AI aversion into words? Here's a handy glossary

Summary

Opinion Are you an AI hater, an AI vegan, or a slightly more moderate AI vegetarian? Or are you on the side of the clankers? A bot-licker, a prompt-fondler, a ChatNPC? LLM bots are everywhere, from your phone to your browser, and increasingly so is their output, which is widely termed "slop" – a term documented two years ago by AI writer and advocate Simon Willison. The Reg FOSS desk was horrified to receive, among his Christmas gifts, a set of drinks coasters printed to vaguely resemble vinyl LPs with illegible slop labels. As well as endless torrents of slop, there are also endless waves of bot promoters. Some of us remain unconvinced. We thought that if you too are a skeptic who has not been persuaded that there's any form of intelligence in these text-prediction machines, there might be reassurance in knowing that you're not alone – and that there are some useful terms for how staunch your resistance is. Sean Boots recently offered a new term: "Generative AI vegetarianism." He describes a moderate position: Even so, he continues: His list of reasons is sound, and there is much to recommend in a non-confrontational approach. However, it is not this vulture's. Boots also links to several other, more strident statements, and we enjoyed all of them. Jenny Zhang wrote in "choosing friction": It's just over 2,000 words long, and we can't really fault one of them. We also liked Rusty Foster's recent "A.I. Isn't People," which carefully and methodically deconstructs the claims that large language models can "think" or "reason" or "learn" or are "intelligent" for any possible definition of the term. The one we sympathized with most is from Anthony Moser. His statement is plain – "I Am An AI Hater": There is some mileage in the concept of being an AI vegan, but the thing that many vegans will find is that if they travel far enough, they'll find themselves in a country where they don't speak the language and can't explain their restrictions. The Reg FOSS desk is not vegan,...