When ‘AI’ Is Asked to Mean Everything at Once

At a Variety entertainment-and-technology panel, experts tried to work out what AI actually means for the industry. Google’s vice president of technology and society, Mira Line, argued the label itself is overloaded — in her words, the word “AI” is doing too much right now. As reported by Variety, that was one of the sharper points of the discussion, not a product announcement. Optimist: a fuzzy label just means the useful work is easy to miss; the fix is narrower words. Skeptic: narrower words are how vendors avoid saying “chatbot with a marketing budget.”