The genericide of AI (or: not all AI is GenAI)

Genericide. Sounds a bit dramatic 🤔

But when a specific brand of ‘thing’ becomes so well known that the brand name becomes the noun for the thing, that’s called ‘trademark erosion’, ‘trademark genericisation’, or ‘genericide’.

Think: ‘Hoover’ instead of ‘vacuum cleaner’, ‘Kleenex’ instead of ‘tissue’, lino, band-aid, aspirin, even google.

Now AI isn’t a trademark, so ‘genericide’ is probably more fitting for this topic.

Anyhoo, we are having a bit of a difficult moment right now, where the relatively sudden spike in headlines, opinion pieces and – rightful – concerns about the rise and misuse of generative AI has led to us collectively using the term ‘AI’ to mean ‘generative AI’.

But not all AI is generative AI.

And not all generative AI is solely generative AI.

(and we haven’t even mentioned Machine Learning (ML) at this point)

Chat GPT, CoPilot, Claude, Gemini and other well known or popular ‘AIs’ are, to varying extents, amazing, wonderful, useful, timesaving, productivity-enhancing, terrible, art-robbing, markers of the ultimate downfall of humanity.

The current demonisation of generative AI in some areas is not unwarranted. There are absolutely conversations to be had and decisions to be made about how these systems should or should not be used in so many spaces.

Baby =/= bathwater

But I worry that, by not differentiating between ‘AI’ and ‘generative AI’ in our attention-grabbing headlines and our wider conversations we risk taking that demonisation too far.

AI and ML have been around for at least as long as I’ve been working (and that’s a long time), and we have been benefiting from the implementation of both, for a lot of that time, in ways that many of us just don’t realise.

It’s only recently that AI and ML have ‘escaped’ into the mainstream, instead of just quietly optimising things behind the scenes, and started to have a really visible and profound impact on our day-to-day lives.

I see calls for ‘all AI to be banned’ and that’s just not realistic. The cat is out of the bag, the horse has bolted, the pizza is always going to be ready in 7 minutes or less.

If we were to ban all AI, the vast majority of us would be surprised and disappointed at just how far-reaching that ban would be. A bit of a moot point in any case, because I don’t think banning all AI is actually feasible.

Words mean things

However, for a lot of people – most people in fact – generative AI is the only AI they really know, beyond sci-fi, and so the majority’s understanding of the term is going to be the one that sticks.

AI, as a term, has been genericised.

This makes doing anything, talking about anything, certainly attempting to sell anything, that involves AI/ML in broader terms very difficult.

Do we need a new term?

What would it be?

If it were possible to agree on a new way to describe broader AI/ML that sets it apart from its sub-genre GenAI, how do we get it across in a way that makes sense and retains the actual meaning?

Dremel your answers on a frisbee and sellotape it to the comments below.