AI as a verb

Remember when Google was new and we all finally made the leap from noun to verb and started saying that we would google something.  This led to a bit of a battle with Google over whether they still retained the name as a trademark because a shift from noun to other parts of speech is usually an indicator that the word has entered the language as a general term and is a dictionary item, not a trademark.

So now we have become familiar enough with AI to say ‘I’ll AI it’.  In my household we say ‘I’ll ask Chad (our name for ChatGPT)’ which is easier and more comfortable.  I think we are not quite happy with AI’ing and AI’ed.  No one is sure whether to put in the apostrophe or not.  This is why there has been a move to creating a new word AIask (from the name of a cousin of Chad, Ask AI). Pronounced [ay-eye-ask]. But that one doesn’t seem comfortable either.

Another contributor has pointed out that in Randa Abdel-Fattahs’s new novel Discipline a new verb, to Hey-Siri, has appeared:

‘Hannah needed to settle her heart. She couldn’t keep up with this frenzied pace. She Hey-Siri’d Spotify to play the Quran and relaxed her hands on the steering wheel as she moved along at 20 kays an hour, although it was difficult to feel any sense of peace as a Mercedes C63 in the next lane blasted Nicki Minaj (and not a clean version) with the windows down.’

New technologies demand more of English than mere trademarks.