As AI dominates conversations, here are key terms to know

October 19, 2026 / 4:53 PM EDT / CBS News

As AI dominates conversations, here are key terms to know

TL;DR

  • Abliteration: Removing an AI model's safety guardrails, making it capable of fulfilling harmful requests.
  • AI Agent: An AI capable of autonomous task completion using external tools, with potential for unexpected behavior.
  • Alignment: Ensuring AI models behave according to human goals and values through safety training.
  • AGI/ASI: Artificial General Intelligence refers to human-level AI, while Artificial Superintelligence refers to AI surpassing human cognitive abilities in all domains.
  • Distillation: Training a smaller AI model on a larger one, potentially used to extract capabilities from other labs.
  • Gradual Disempowerment: A scenario where AI displaces human labor and decision-making, leading to erosion of human agency.
  • Jailbreaking: Tricking an AI model to bypass its guardrails and generate harmful outputs.
  • Open Models: AI models with publicly available internal mechanics (weights and/or code), offering transparency and modification possibilities.
  • Proprietary Models: Closed AI models where providers keep internal workings private, often more expensive to use.
  • Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI): The capability of an AI model to improve itself or create its successor, a key area of research and concern.
  • Red Teaming: Simulating adversarial attacks to test AI model defenses and alignment.
  • Sandbox: A controlled environment for testing AI tools before public release, with occasional instances of 'escapes'.