We have many terms for these artificial intelligences: “agents”, “agentic AIs”, “AIs”, “clankers,” “generative AI” etc. All are lacking.
“Agent” is perhaps closest, as an agent is one who acts on behalf of another. “Agentic AI” then is precisely wrong, because it implies that the AI itself has agency, which is the opposite of the truth. I feel this term is harmful because the intuitions it gives rise to are contrary to good sense, and frankly, the law. In the “There Is No Historic Defeat for Civil Rights” Advisory Opinions podcast, released April 16, 2026, French says:
Adobe Paint is more like the canvas and the paintbrush. AI actually does the whole thing like the portrait painter… The manufacturer of the AR-15 isn’t responsible for the school shooting. But if I went to Remington and I said … ‘go kill somebody,’ and a Remington employee did it at my request, they’ve got legal liability… The whole appeal of it is that it is doing stuff on its own… in a way that simulates a human acting independently [which creates] a very significant liability problem.”
But it doesn’t. Left to it’s own devices, it just sits there. And if it does act “spontaneously” it’s because someone introduced a subroutine to have it act “spontaneously”. AIs have no agency and this is a critical difference between them and humans, and a fundamental identity they share with all other tools.
The proto-slur “clanker” makes the same mistake, but coming from a different direction.
The less loaded terms are either too generic (“AI”) too narrow (“LLMs”) or too much of a mouthful (“generative AI”) to be useful either.
The best analogy is perhaps the apocryphal quotation attributed to Aristotle that “a slave is a tool that talks”. “Talking tool” is an excellent description of generative AI, and it is precisely its ability to speak so convincingly that makes us forget it is a tool, not in the sense that you can instrumentalize it to achieve an end, but that it inherently selects no ultimate ends of its own.
Instrumentum vocale or phōnêen órganon may be better terms but they are even more of a mouthful. Maybe “voxbox” best captures how they are an engine for words, but not a mind. Here are some more voxbox generated terms: tell me which you like the best:
Talkware
Wordware
Replyware
Chatware
Voxware
Voxbox