The Royal Spanish Academy chose the word of 2022: artificial intelligence

For the choice of Fundéu Rae, the massive circulation of the concept that defines the spirit of the time was taken into account.

The artificial intelligencean expression that the dictionary defines as the discipline that is responsible for creating computer programs that execute orders similar to those of the human brain, was chosen as the “word of the year” by the Urgent Spanish Foundation (Fundéu Rae).

It is a decision that takes into account the mass circulation that this concept has had in recent times, derived not only from its specific scope but also from the ethical dilemmas that its application generates.

The choice of this word by the institution that regulates and legislates the use of the Spanish language adds to the similar powers that in recent weeks have also been carried out by different dictionaries in the Saxon language such as Oxford o Collinsamong others.

In both cases they consecrated in a similar instance to expressions such as goblin mode, permacrisis, ukrainian, inflation and gaslighting. Words or idioms as revealing of era-defining phenomena as artificial intelligence.

In its ruling released this Thursday, the Fundéu Rae maintains that this concept was incorporated into the Academy’s dictionary in its edition of 1992 and was selected for “its important presence in the media during the last 12 months, as well as in the social debate, due to the various advances made in this area and the derived ethical consequences”.

for this competition 12 words decided to be “the most important of the year”. Several of them related to technology or the consequences derived from Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

The 12 competitors were: apocalypse, cryptocurrency, diversity, ecocide, gas pipeline, gigafactory, flu, inflation, artificial intelligence, sex-doping, bumping and Ukrainian.

Data analysis, cybersecurity, finance or linguistics are some of the areas that benefit from “artificial intelligence”.

This concept went from being a technology reserved for specialists to accompanying people in their daily lives: in the form of a virtual assistant -such as those incorporated in smartphones-, of applications that can create illustrations from previous ones or of chats that they are able to hold a conversation almost at the same level as a person.

The artificial intelligence concept was also very present due to the ethical implication What does the development of machine intelligence mean: doubts about the extent to which the work that this technology is capable of doing will mean replacing certain professionals was one of the great debates of this 2022.

From a linguistic point of view, the expression artificial intelligence is a common denomination and, therefore, it is appropriate to write it entirely with lower case.

However, it is common to see in texts “the use of its acronym, IA, which is written with a capital letter, and is preferable to the English AI (artificial intelligence)”.

But there is an exception in which it is correct to write it in capital letters: “Yes it is appropriate when the expression is part of a proper name, as in Artificial Intelligence Research Institute”.

According to Fundéu Rae, one of the challenges that artificial intelligence implies is teaching machines how to use Spanish properly, in order to preserve the unity of the language shared by more than 500 million people.

Precisely with this objective, the LEIA project of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) was born.

This is the tenth time that Fundéu Rae has chosen its word of the year. The previous ones were escrache (2013), selfie (2014), refugee (2015), populism (2016), aporophobia (2017), microplastic (2018), emojis (2019), confinement (2020) and vaccine (2021).

With information from Telam

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