That artificial intelligence It’s on everyone’s lips, it’s nothing new. The CDO of Telefónica, Chema Alonso, recently stated at the event Metafuture, organized by Atresmedia, that this tool has to make us “rethink how we educate our children”, in order to prepare them for a future in which AI is fully integrated into society. At the same event, AI expert and CEO of Wired magazine, David Rowan, insisted that not even he wants to the people who run artificial intelligence companies know what’s going on inside what he wanted to call the ‘black box’ of AI.

That is why FundéuRAE chose, in 2022, this term as word of the year, and now, a year later, so does the Collins Dictionary. “‘AI’, a term that describes the modeling of human mental functions using computer programs, has been named the Collins Word of 2023. Considered the next great technological revolution, artificial intelligence has seen rapid development and There has been a lot of talk about her in 2023“, they point out. In 2022, the word of the year for this dictionary was ‘permacrisis’ – “a prolonged period of instability and insecurity” – while Oxford dictionaries opted for ‘goblin mode‘ —’leprechaun mode,’ a colloquial term for a type of “deliberately self-indulgent, lazy, careless, or greedy behavior that rejects social norms or expectations.”

The (other) words of the year 2023

In addition to artificial intelligence, Collins Dictionaries has a list of other nine words which, he considers, have marked the year 2023, many of which, without a literal translation into Spanish.

  • Bazball
  • Deinfluence
  • Nepo baby
  • Ultra-processed
  • Canon event
  • Debanking
  • Greedflation
  • Semaglutide
  • ULEZ

‘Bazball‘ is, for example, a term coined in the United Kingdom throughout the 2022 cricket season, defined by David Shariatmadari, author of ‘Don’t believe a word of it. From Myths to Misunderstandings: How Language Really Works’, as an energetic (sometimes aggressive) new style of cricket, pioneered by England coach Brendn ‘Baz’ McCullum. This list also includes the term ‘deinfluencing‘, which would be a variation of what the well-known ‘influencers’ do on social networks: in this case, it refers to the use of them to, instead of recommending the use of certain services or the purchase of certain goods, warn them not to use or buy some items or not following certain lifestyles.

From this area of ​​new ‘famous’ also emerges another of the words of the year for Collins dictionaries, ‘nepo baby’, also without a literal translation: it refers to a person whose career has exploded due to having a famous father. The word that does have a translation is the next one on the list, ‘ultraprocessed’, which refers to these foods that receive industrial treatment and processing during which their nature is changed, by adding fat, salt, sugar, additives or other components. Continuing with the food terminology, there would also be the word ‘semaglutide’which refers to a medication for the treatment of type 2 diabetes and obesity, also known by its trade name, Ozempic.

On the other hand, ‘canon event‘, which refers to an “essential event for the formation of the character or identity of an individual” and which has acquired a certain significance in younger social networks, such as TikTok. The next two words of the year for Collins come from the economic field: on the one hand, ‘debanking‘, which is the act of “depriving a person of banking services”, which in Spanish is known as ‘debanking’; and on the other, ‘greedflation‘, which is the “use of inflation to raise prices to artificially high levels, in order to increase corporate profits”, a term known in the United States as the ‘greed inflation‘.

The last Collins word of the year is ULEZan acronym for ‘ultra low emission zone’, very familiar to Londoners: it is an area within cities (in London, for example, there is a large ULEZ) that is active 24 hours a day and which mainly affects buses, trucks and vans that do not meet the environmental conditions to enter, so if they have to do so, will have to pay a fee.