We cannot say for sure if machines will take over the world, but they appear to have already conquered our conversations. 'AI' has officially been crowned Word of the Year by Collins Dictionary. Meaning'the modelling of human mental functions by computer programs', the term is an abbreviation for Artificial Intelligence. In the shortlist for word of the year, Collins ranked AI just above'greedflation', 'Nepo Baby' and'ULEZ'. 'Use of the word as monitored through our Collins Corpus is always interesting and there was no question that this has also been the talking point of 2023,' said Alex Beecroft, managing director of Collins.