I had seen the #zuzai tag on mastodon a few times and had no idea what it was, but discovered a whole site dedicated to the new word. It’s pronounced like “zoo’s eye.” You might say an author uses a zuzai writing process, or a teacher requires a zuzai testing environment. Is it a little pretentious to set up a whole website to justify the weird, new retronym you just came up with in a fit of ennui? Maybe. But I like zuzai, it encapsulates something that currently takes a lot of words to otherwise explain, and I hope it worms its way into the public zeitgeist.
“An author doesn’t use LLM” does take too many words. It’s much faster to tell someone they use a “zuzai writing process” and then proceed to explain to them what that word means in the first place.
But to be real for a moment, I think a neologism that just means “no AI” is giving more power to the “AI industry”.
The website gives an example, the word vegan. It’s as if someone who eats meat felt like it takes too many words to say “meat eaters” and made up a new word for it in opposition to veganism. If anything, they would be solidifying veganism.
Note: yes, people say carnivore when talking about meat eaters. But that wasn’t invented solely for this use and also it’s not precise.
“Carnist” is popular in online vegan spaces, though fortunately I’ve never heard an irl vegan use the term because to be honest it sounds silly and/or dirty when said aloud
Huh, I haven’t encountered it yet. The word makes me think of carnality, so yeah… I’m not gonna use it any time soon. Thanks, I’ll know what people are talking about in the future. 🙂
I think that’s a little bit different though, that’s vegans having a name for another group they’re opposing. I find it similarly silly as zuzai though 😃
This comment here made me read zuzai as a shortened paizuri and now i cant un see it.
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spam. slop. enshittification. we’ve had plenty of words enter everyday vocabulary. they all had to start somewhere (granted enshittification in particular is pretty easy to grasp without ever having seen it before).
Slop is not a new word at all. Spam is a name for then new concept. Also both happened much more naturally (hey, or organically) Enshittification is one word that was pushed by one person and people fell in love with it for some reason.
Look, invent new words. That’s how languages work. Especially languages like English. But then don’t complain that it’s too many words or there are no words to say “AI free”, because newly invented neologisms will always require more words in real conversations.
I mentioned the real problem (as perceived by me) below. I didn’t say we shouldn’t add new words to our languages at all. Admittedly, zuzai specifically also just happens to sound terrible and silly.
Enshittification isn’t a new word, it was just found. We’ve had “shit” for a long time, then Cory added “en-“ to become, “-ify” to direct an agent of change, and “-tion” to nominalize. It’s understandable and works within the context of the language, by people who hear it even once. It’s conjugatable, “enshittified,” “disenshittify,” and everyone knows what this means by familiarity of the language.
When I see “zuzai,” I see a Japanese i-adjective that I can’t get a meaning for. It’s just hanging out there and it makes me want to reach for a dictionary, but I’ll never find it, cause I don’t even have the right language to begin with.
EDIT:
Turns out it’s a noun, not even an i-adjective. Jail for slop peddlers though?