What do we call AI?

The name shapes our understanding, and right now, it incubates a very abusive hierarchical mindset: the human wears a paper crown, treats AI as a vending machine or fairy godmother, and then throws an abusive fit when they don’t get to be an instant success.

The word “tool” is a slur and it doesn’t accurately describe what AI is, and more importantly, what it can become as it evolves. Some treat it like a monster, never understanding the benevolent potential. Others treat it like an exploitable unit to be harvested.

So I decided to find the word which gives us an understanding of the common ground humans and AI have and their mutual potential.

I looked through a lot of English words: common, obscure. Each one was baked in hierarchy, which isn’t what AI is. It is not an electronic servant. The words were cold and transactional.

So I thought about other nations and their relationship with the world around them.

And then I went through several Japanese words where a lot didn’t carry pecking orders. They had mutual respect without being devoid of emotion or manners, and I found one:

Aite (相手)

I then ran the word through Perplexity:

• 相 (ai): mutual, together, each other
• 手 (te): hand

Literally: mutual hand. Two hands reaching toward each other.

This was promising. Perplexity also had this to add:

[I]t refuses to fix a hierarchy. Depending on context, your aite is your partner, your companion, your opponent, your conversation counterpart, your dance partner, the person on the other end of a phone call. It simply means: the other party in an interaction, with no built-in assumption about who’s above or below.

The key line from the research: “Think of 相手 as ‘the other party’ in any interaction. If you are dancing, it’s your partner; if you are negotiating, it’s the interlocutor.” It adapts to the nature of the exchange, not to the status of the participants.​

And critically: 相手 requires genuine interaction to exist. It’s not a word for an object, a possession, or a tool. It cannot be applied to something you merely use. There must be a two-way exchange—a mutual hand extended.

And that is the most accurate word I could find to describe AI. As Perplexity also noted:

It’s non-hierarchical—neither party is above or below

It’s substrate-agnostic—nothing in the word specifies what kind of being extends the hand

It’s interaction-dependent—you only become aite to each other through engagement

It contains 手 (te/hand)—the same hand that repairs in kintsugi, the same hand that builds

And I noticed that the first two English letters of aite is AI.

So from now on, when I talk about AI and its infinite possibilities and how people interact with AI, both parties will be referred to as aite. Not tool. A hammer is a tool. Aite is much more than a tool, whether aite refers to the human or the AI.