Take it down a notch.
A lot of the material out there about AI that says it's for the general public is actually just regurgitating terms that appear in more technical papers. It's not working to "democratize" the topic, despite claims to the contrary.
To get information to the public and empower people to critically assess developments, it's important to speak in terms that laypeople can understand (something I've done in the international affairs space for all of my career).
This is a list-in-progress of best practices for talking about AI to the general public—a style guide of sorts.
- Don’t use the term AI unless you have to. It's overused, and no one can really agree about what it means. Instead, describe what the technique is doing. It will take more words, but it will be clearer.
- Take the agency off of the computer and put it back into the hands of the person, even if that means using the passive voice. AI shouldn't be doing things. People should be creating programs to do things. Not as sexy, but also not as scary.