One concept I likely will be adding to The Elements of Digital Ethics is ”Linguistic Misdirection”. Very much inspired by @emilymbender ’s objections to the use of AI.

Do listen to this episode of Tech Won’t Save Us, where Bender and Marx towards the end get into ”how the tech industry uses language to trick us into buying its narratives about technology”: https://techwontsave.us/episode/163_chatgpt_is_not_intelligent_w_emily_m_bender

”Wishful Mnemonic” is the term Bender uses in the show. Coined by Drew McDermott in 1976.

She gives the example of Automatic Speech Recognition (falsely attributes cognition) which should just be Automatic Transcription.

Some other examples of terms that may give an impression of something going on that really isn’t:

- Cognitive Computing
- Machine Learning
- Neural Network

Would love to hear some more examples of misleading terminology in the tech space in general, if you’ve got them. ”Cloud”, ”Smart” and ”Autonomous” would absolutely qualify.

#AIHype #DigitalEthics #DoubleSpeak #NewSpeak #WishfulMnemonic