Politico podcast Pod Save America^[1] posted a scorched earth analysis of a July 2026 interview between infamous billionaire Elon Musk and The Economist^[2], and as a side note one of the hosts, Jon Lovett, made an interesting side comment about AI.

“…putting all of these disparate technologies under the one idea of AI is really been making things harder to have an honest conversation about it…”^[3] 

I can’t tell you if this is a unique thought from Lovett or I am just next in the chain of a sentiment that has been spreading online, but I couldn’t agree more with the notion. 

Lovett suggesting we need to stop grouping all AI under one blanket term hits a particular nerve I hadn’t quite realized was tingling for me. Using the term AI for every algorithmic process makes it hard to disentangle the good from bad, useful from entertaining, benign from the sinister.

Because that’s the rub, isn’t it? One group is telling us about the glorious benefits of AI to the future of humanity. They proclaim the wonders of amplification of productivity …while skirting the issue of amplification of efficiency in surveillance systems. They marvel at the efficiency and cost saving of creative grunt work …while shrugging off the impacts of AI slop generated through the human costs of piracy of real creative output.

And the truth is genuine honest discourse too quickly becomes blurred in this balancing act of trying to define it all as one big piece of technology, be that in popular media, in boardrooms or just swirling about in the cultural zeitgeist. 

What is AI, after all? Is it the low-friction chat bot apps we get on our phone? Is it the integrated toolkits that are infiltrating operating systems, word processors, media apps, and more? Is AI the new front page of our search engines? Or is AI a quiet command line process running invisibly through databases making connections between vastly and incomprehensibly huge points in an ocean of information?

It might be all these things and more.

It might be none of these things.  

But to Lovett’s observation, with no simple breakout definition, it is making it difficult to talk about it in an honest way.