It’s been quite a long time since we stopped naming servers like pets, instead treating them more like cattle farms. Servers get inventory numbers, and naming schemes might reference their type (webserver05-external.whoever.com), but cool naming schemes based on The Lord of the Rings or Twilight have mostly faded into the past. But AI has brought cute naming back to the forefront.
Watson. Claude. Alexa. While we all know those big ones, less well-known AIs with human names abound: Athena. Finn. Alfred. Charlotte. Amelia. Erica. Maya. The list goes on and on, and I know a security professional whose entire immediate family now all has an AI with their name (which, I suppose, is worse than my family, where all but one of us has a major hurricane name).
Why is this a problem? First, it’s human-unfriendly. If your AI is squatting on a human name, it creates annoyance and pain directly for those humans, and creates unneeded confusion in an organization (did I want you to talk to Claude, our head of security, or Claude, your AI sidekick). There’s no need to do this.
The second reason is more subtle. In an agentic world, you’ll have a fleet of Ais to interact with, which while they might use human norms for communication with you, aren’t humans. They’re different, in a way that humans shouldn’t forget about. More powerful in some ways, and more dangerous in others. Humans shouldn’t mistake an AI for fellow humans, but should always keep in mind that this is an AI, especially as companies become more and more dominated by AI agents.
How should we name them, then? If you want to be cute, nonhuman names (orcs, for instance) might be an entertaining approach. Things that weren’t really names (Grok, Mistral, Gemini) work well. Modified human names (HAL9000) might solve the second problem, but still leaves humans with an unfortunate overlap. The best might be the semi-descriptive names (ChatGPT, DALL-E, Skynet), as they are clearly simultaneously a name and a non-human descriptor.
The challenge will be when each human has a fleet of agents, and needs to keep track of each of them.
Perhaps a personalized naming scheme closer to fighter wings might help (“Red-6, pull up!”), but administrators will need to balance usability and descriptiveness.
