I have often heard native speakers use the plural of ‘AI’ saying things like ‘we now have AI’s that help us transform all aspects of our lives’ etc. How does this sound to you? I mean, would you use AI as a countable noun?
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I think it may be a subconscious thing to add a plural form to words that are not by definition singular and plural at the same time. Such as, deer, fish, moose, etc. From a native’s point of view it sounds perfectly normal.
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To me, intelligence is always a non-count noun. So, it cannot be pluralized. The problem here could have been solved by using various kinds of AI to mean plural. However, the intelligence being artificial, and the language users being free, any linguistic aspect can be ‘artificilized’ under AI.
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Apparently, AI is countable as well as uncountable. It is perfectly correct to say things like ‘In our course you will learn how to build an AI’ or ‘make an AI to beat games’ (found on the Udemy site) and almost every speaker at the Singularity University conference treats AI as countable. I mean, if people the likes of Liesl Yearsley, Steve Hatfield, Will Weisman, Neil Jacobstein and Rob Nail say ‘an AI’, AI is countable.
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Yes, when it is abbreviated as AI, we tend to treat it as countable. Once the native user (unlike the erstwhile Public-School-Educated speakers of Southern England) reads it so, it becomes a usage. We need to recognize and accept it. Yes.
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Again, the abbreviation can be used as a countable as well as an uncountable entity. You can say ‘AI is transforming the way we live’ and ‘our course teaches you how to create an AI that can beat any software game’.
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