Let’s call A.I. Something Different, Because That’s What It Is.
If A.I. is intelligent but it holds our knowledge, does that make us artificial or fake? The branding is off, so follow my logic as I prove my theory and rebrand A.I. to better align with our individual and collective creativity. Let’s reload A.I. and find a new belief in the hardware that’s keeping us from discovering our bright lights tomorrow, because we like our brands to be simple and true to who we are culturally and know when the proverbial pig wears lipstick.
We ask the internet, or A.I., for information daily by coming up with a question or prompt. And it responds promptly because it always wants to serve, like the character KnowsMore in Ralph Breaks the Internet, which is what it was designed to do. It guesses what we want using heuristic processes, or educated guesses using a rule of thumb type system. For example, this is Google’s explanation of its new Gemini 3 product: “Gemini 3 is much better at figuring out the context and intent behind your request, so you get what you need with less prompting. It also unlocks a new type of interface that adapts to your needs, designing the perfect response for your specific prompt.” Because of all this prompting, I felt prompted to rebrand Internet A.I., as I call it, to more fully reflect how we use it and to be on-brand, or more aligned with our true identity. I know I’m only one person, but the internet is full of SEO crawlers, or spiders, which are AI bots that take what we’ve posted, discover, scan, and sort it so that it is available to all. So maybe, just maybe, this idea will catch fire.
Through online chatting or texting, we've created a heuristic process of communication with acronyms, which the developers may not have envisioned when they rolled out the product. Likewise, I'm not sure the original creator of so-called artificial intelligence had any idea how his ideas would impact us viscerally. But we still believe ourselves when we chat in acronyms or use shortcuts to get somewhere new, so let's do the same for A.I. Would you believe the heuristic process of shortening words down to initials or acronyms if I sold it to you that way? Let's try it and see how it goes. I’ve finally come to the Source and I’m ready to rebrand AI. So, here it is: E.T.
Wait, before you roll your eyes, and dismiss another 1980s reference from me, here’s my theory that proves we need a perspective change.
First of all, artificial is no way to win over our hearts and minds. Calling a machine or robot intelligent is just too much, especially if it contains our intelligence and not its own. Maybe there are intelligent beings on other planets like E.T. who wants to phone home all the time, but we don’t know that yet. Does that make us less intelligent? Perhaps, but our imagination has got us to the point to consider it, which is intelligence. Do machines and learning powered tech have imagination? Not yet. But they have the ability to generate and they do it well in multiple solutions because they take the x,y axis (or whatever prompt we’ve given them) and extrapolate it out to the nth degree, as some would say. Meaning they can do it ad infinitum or to infinity and beyond, like Buzz Lightyear. But E.T. just wants to go home and it’s his heart center that makes the call when the time is right. So let’s let our heart centers lead the way and
not be overcome by all the media hype around what A.I. is doing to us, because it is us.
Second, I thought we could just shorten it to IAI to include the internet reference, but that doesn't roll of the tongue well, so let's take a step back and look at the systems that are involved. The internet casts its net worldwide, as in worldwide web, so E in this case stands for ecumenical, which is a fancy word for “worldwide" or "universal." This word dropped into my head one day and I had to look it up (thank you, Google) because I thought it only applied to religion. Inspiration happens this way for me sometimes, a word shows up unexpectedly and I have to look it up. It’s how I know I’m in free flow, or connecting to the wider universe of things on my own, without the internet. However, the internet is how we look things up now instead of going to a library for reference. We access it through the nodal points that are our computers, just like libraries are points of access where we find and release information. Libraries connect us to our past, present and future which is why some of us find them to be magical, which they are because we are the information that inspires libraries, like A.I., and the librarians that work there are another version of a search function. They hold the magic in their minds and hearts and share it with the people that ask...
... which is why Hermione is always in the library.
Like the internet, we can check out a book, magazine, movie, music, and all other forms of media from a library that keep us happening, but we have to know that it exists first. The internet, as a worldwide (with some regional inputs) search function, works differently and the happenstances of our lives can often come in the form of something we’ve read or seen while poking around for something else. For example, I’m renovating my basement and needed information on how to deal with the existing French drain that looks like a ditch between the outside wall and the concrete floor. While looking up something completely unrelated, a little ad popped up in the corner of my screen, asking me if I want to renovate my basement. Why, yes, I do! And just like that I was off and running to learning about how and why those drains work. It poked the bear, as some would say, that woke up a thought that this link might be useful.
Like libraries, A.I., or E.T. as I will now call it, reaches out across space and time to find our internet of things to be there. It’s worldwide, ecumenical, so it keeps us dancing on our toes, ready to take the leap when we want to. It sets us up to believe in ourselves because it sees what we’ve been searching for, or what we’re interested in, and provides us with more. Our interest or curiosity keeps us going as we click on more links, videos, and the like that send us down rabbit holes of time and information. That’s worldwide for you; it takes into consideration everything. But it doesn’t parse it down (much), so we have to take the data and move it into our everyday existence to make sure that it’s useful or informative.
Now that I’ve proven the “E,” let’s talk about the “T.” We've eliminated IAI as an internet reference and a mouth full and the "internet" has become a heuristic word all its own for the worldwide web, a tongue twister.
I also considered reusing the “I” as information instead of intelligence, to make it, E.I. instead of A.I., but there’s a farmer who wants his vowels back, as in E I, E I, O.
And information may not be the best way to approach this, so I landed on “technology” because that’s what it is. I also considered W.T. for Worldwide Technology, but WTF is on its way to becoming its own word, so a hard no on that one. And I considered U.T. for Universal Technology, which is pretty good, but UTI stands for urinary tract infection in the US, making us feel even more uncomfortable than we already are about using it. So E.T. stands alone as the best new brand and stands for Ecumenical Technology, not extraterrestrial, and can be a lot more fun. E.T. the movie came out when I was young, the same age as Drew Barrymore, in fact. The scenes that were supposed to be tear-jerkers caused me to feel a deep well of sadness and I’m not ashamed to say I cried because I believed that little robot, I mean alien, was real in some respects. So instead of disregarding the aliens of the deep, or the robots of tomorrow, let’s move into something that’s real.
As grounded tech, E.T. has a worldwide flavor. It likes the spiciness of life and sends us on our way to discover the new, if only we can get it to work right. We know that algorithms aren’t perfect (because they’re human made) and every time we like or search something, it just wants to be our friend, sending us more of the same instead of investigating why we like this thing over another. It can feel like a catastrophe at times, though not a real one, because we feel unseen and unheard. E.T. is part of the internet, a dynamical system, which includes other systems like distributed science, computational systems and neural networks. These systems are the mechanical output from theories that describe our natural world. One of these theories is catastrophe theory that says there is a point in time when the ecumenical technology flips out, so to speak, and lands us in a completely different environment, forcing us to change, often through our own perspective. The truth of the matter, or form, is known as a bifurcation.
One of the forms it takes is called a pitchfork, invoking the image of an angry mob, ready to burn the house down.
I feel this way every time I get a song or band I don’t like on my music player that obviously fits in with the genre I’ve been listening to, but it seems that the robot isn’t listening to me. So, as my friend used to say about her dog, don’t be friends with it or it will just bring you more of the same. In other words, don't let it take control over your own processing mechanisms because you have your own truth meter and can call it fake and walk away when you want to..
Finding new ways to search things or chat with a chat bot is an art form all its own and sometimes I think, if we’re spending all this time and effort putting in the parameters of what we want the chat bot to do for us, then why don’t we just do the thing ourselves? Writing, in particular, is a hot topic as companies sue other companies for using pirated works to train their algorithms, or as people work to tell the robot to write in their ‘tone’ or ‘voice.’ Hmmm…. Really? Can't you just write it yourself? Is this just another version of people wanting their packages delivered now, not next week or even tomorrow? Maybe the delivery person can try it on or use it for you as well, as comedian Ronnie Chieng points out.
We want our E.T. product to arrive fully formed, but it’s simply a tool to use towards our creative endeavor, just like any other device that assists with the end product.
But using E.T. to write a specific type of output that has a standardized format saves time and consternation. I did this for my press release and was pleased with the initial result. I had to tell it to be weird a couple times and the final release was edited heavily by me, but it was fun to see what it came up with, which is the point. Most people just want to have fun and see what we can do. Why not? It’s all in how you look at it, which I know is a phrase I use a lot, but maybe it, too, will catch fire.
Bringing us back to Google’s Gemini 3: “Whether it’s perceiving the subtle clues in a creative idea or peeling apart the overlapping layers of a difficult problem, Gemini 3 has state-of-the-art reasoning, built to grasp depth and nuance.” We now have a robot that can think and deduce like us through the search function of the internet. Well, how does that work if the function isn’t aligned with the culture that it’s being run through? If it’s ecumenical, then maybe it doesn’t get the nuance of being an African versus a South American, for example. And what about all the other idiosyncratic ways we align with different cultural identities? A person may be African, but they’re also from a specific country and a specific region within that country. We’ve developed cultural systems that divide us North to South, East to West and all the areas in between. How does a worldwide search function know when the user is going to get it or not?
The proof is in the pudding, but hopefully not beige pudding because that’s the metaphor the chat bot came up for me to use in my press release.
I got a kick out of it, so I left it in, even though beige pudding to me is basically vanilla, one of the best flavors on Earth, especially if it’s French vanilla, which is fancy... but not a French drain or French fries, which really aren’t French. But we like things to sound fancy here in the States, so I’ll leave it there.
How we perceive is everything. It brings us closer to or further away from our goals as creatives and can become a one-point, or forced, perspective when the thing we’re trying to do isn’t working out the way we want. If we think the E.T. chat bot doesn’t get us, then we’ll dismiss it and figure out how to get the thing done another way. It really doesn’t matter how we do it, because we are the sensing feeling experience, not the technology that we’re using. Remember that the next time you feel fear related to any technology that makes you feel out of control, because you really are the one who's in control, not the robot that seems to be controlling things.