The words that scare us, put back in their place

These are mostly used for headlines. They refer to real things, but not always the ones you might think.

AGI, "artificial general intelligence"

An AI that could do anything as well as a human, in any field. It does not exist. Current systems are impressive with language but fall flat on tasks a child can manage. When an article announces AGI, always check who is speaking and what they are selling.

The singularity

A hypothesis: the moment when AI would improve itself so quickly that no one could keep up. It is a hypothesis, not a timeline. The word belongs to the realm of ideas, not the news bulletin.

A deepfake

An image, voice or video fabricated to make it seem someone said or did something. The technique is real and accessible. The word is sometimes misused to describe any generated image, including those that fool no one.

A bias

A distortion inherited from training texts. If the examples mostly link a job to a gender, the model will reproduce it. This is not the machine's opinion, it is a reflection of what it was shown, which does not make it harmless for all that.

"Open source"

A model whose files are published and that anyone can install on their own machine. That does not mean we know what it was trained on: most often, it is the weights that are open, not the data.