Looking at the various dictionaries' Word Of The Year 2023 winners - let’s hope no good words come out in the next 10 days hey? - I see they’ve been almost as distracted as I have by the robot brains.
Dictionary.com focuses on a key limiting factor of today’s automated chatters: their ability to answer you with fiction, indistinguishable from fact in its presentation. They go with ‘hallucinate’. Which isn’t a new word of course, but OK, it was really only this year that journalists, commentators, and everyone of a certain type who you follow on social media started to write en masse about computers having them:
(of artificial intelligence) to produce false information contrary to the intent of the user and present it as if true and factual.
Cambridge goes for something similar. In fact something exactly the same: ‘hallucinate’. It’s definition now includes the following:
When an artificial intelligence hallucinates, it produces false information
I don’t know that I love the way either definition is phrased, but they’re the word experts I suppose.
Collins is on the same theme, but a bit more general. Their word of the year is ‘AI’. Which is actually an abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence, but no need to be picky.
the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs
We have certainly successfully modelled the human mental function of not telling the truth, as confirmed twice above.
Oxford goes with something totally different, something for the youngsters: ‘rizz’. This word was new to me at least in 2023. Perhaps an abbreviation of charisma, it’s a noun:
style, charm, or attractiveness, the ability to attract a romantic or sexual partner.
Avid followers of bad things might remember a crossover technology featuring both rizz and the risk of hallucinations in the guise of rizzGPT, which was to be a weird thing you put on your glasses that offers “real-time Charisma as a Service (CaaS)”.
Mirriam-Webster goes with “authentic”. It has 5 possible meanings in their telling, none of which feel particularly new to this year. The first is as follows:
not false or imitation: real, actual.
Although this choice feels a bit dated to me - didn’t we go through a bout of authenticity a few years ago? - maybe it’s not so unrelated to the ones above; an antithesis to the other dictionaries' theses.
Mirriam-Webster thinks that the increase in interest of the definition of the word authentic is “driven by stories and conversations about AI, celebrity culture, identity, and social media.” - also known as conversations about hallucinations, AI and people trying to demonstrate their rizz.