The Urgent Spanish Foundation (FundéuRAE), an institution promoted by the EFE Agency and the Royal Spanish Academy, has decided to award the title of word of the year to a complex expression that is increasingly common among ordinary people: artificial intelligence.
For FundéuRAE, artificial intelligence is a construction that in the academic dictionary is defined as “scientific discipline that deals with creating computer programs that execute operations comparable to those performed by the human mind, such as learning or logical reasoning.” Its choice as word of the year is based on the important presence that it has had during the course of this year in the media and social debate, which derives from the advances developed within the field (especially in consumption) and has generated debates about possible ethical consequences.
Another reason put forward by the institution is the doubts generated by the writing of artificial intelligence. Because it is a common denomination, it is appropriate to write it with lower case. On the other hand, FundéuRAE also recommends using the initials IA in Spanish, which must be written in capital letters, instead of the AI in English, which correspond to artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence is an area or a topic that has existed for decades, either in the field of real computing or through works of science fiction (see the well-known Terminator Skynet), which is why the concept is present in the dictionary of the academy since 1992.
FundéuRAE rightly exposes the evolution that artificial intelligence has undergone in recent years, and that is that this branch of computing has gone from being something only within the reach of specialists and specific sectors to being very present in our homes through devices of different nature. For example, NVIDIA’s DLSS is a technology that relies on artificial intelligence to work and has set a path that has been followed by Intel and AMD with XeSS and FSR respectively, although the technology from Radeon will implement artificial intelligence based on from FSR 3. Tools or components such as translators and personal digital assistants, among other things, can also be mentioned here.
Academics around the Spanish language are not oblivious to technological progress, so in 2020 the Royal Spanish Academy created a project called LEIA (Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence) to teach machines to speak Spanish correctly and which has the backed by the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE) and at least had the support of Telefónica in the beginning. Other corporations like Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Twitter and Facebook have also pitched in.
Artificial intelligence has been chosen as word of the year among twelve other candidates that have been popularized by social movements, the preponderance of the technological sector in our lives and the invasion of Ukraine by Russia: apocalypse, cryptocurrency, diversity, ecocide, gas pipeline, gigafactory, flu, inflation, artificial intelligence, sex-doping, run into and Ukrainian.
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