A Critical Vocabulary for Artificial Intelligence: Terms for the politics and ideology of large language and diffusion models
The AI industry supplies most of the words we use to describe its technology. It has been delivered to us through analogies of thinking machines, intelligence, and parallels to human cognition. Alternate vocabulary is a useful tool for creating clarity beyond the industry’s frame. This page collects and clarifies terminology I’ve used in writing about the politics & ideology of AI, particularly large language and diffusion models. The document includes sections on the myths of generative AI (following Barthes); the system from nowhere (following Nagel, Haraway, and Rosen); the hypothetical image / AI image as infographic; noise, the age of noise; and stochastic flocks (following Bender, Gebru, McMillan-Major and Mitchell). Sources and additional recommended citations are listed after each section.