Why the AI industry is so fond of the prefix ‘co’ – by an expert in linguistics

AI companies and evangelists frequently use terms such as co-pilot, co-worker, co-creator and co-scientist to imply these rapidly developing systems can happily co-exist with us humans. Their inference is clear: people should always be in the loop – the AI is never in charge. But amid stories of AI models going rogue and the prospect of recursive self-improvement (when AIs can improve themselves), is this form of language still appropriate – or a linguistic smokescreen we should be wary of? In my career researching science, language and society, I have studied the use of “co” and other linguistic trends used by AI companies to describe and market their products. The humble prefix “co”, derived from the Latin preposition “com”, means “together”, “mutually” or “in common”. But what seems linguistically unremarkable can, in the modern context of AI systems, convey a lot of interesting – and potentially misleading – meanings. While “AI assistant” implies a subordinate role and “AI agent” real autonomy, “co” evokes shared agency and joint ownership of a task. This makes it strategically ambiguous. An AI co-product can be sold to investors as capable and autonomous, thus justifying its price and ambition. At the same time, it can be sold to users and regulators as safely subordinate, reassuring them that a human is still in control. An introduction to the AI ‘companion’ Copilot. Video: Microsoft. Copilot takes off One of the most interesting uses of “co” to convey a particular message about AI products is Copilot – the name of Microsoft’s suite of AI models. In aviation, a copilot supports the pilot but isn’t in command. The Observer newspaper’s technology journalist John Naughton has called copilot “the tech industry’s favourite metaphor”, because it lets the human feel in charge while the tool actually fosters dependency. The word entered AI discourse as a metaphor when GitHub, a coding platform, released an AI coding tool called GitHub Copilot. This was built in collaboration with OpenAI – the company that a year later became famous overnight when it released ChatGPT. GitHub used the name Copilot to metaphorically frame “pair programming” – in the sense of the AI model being a second coder sitting beside you, assisting but never taking the wheel. GitHub foregrounded this aviation metaphor with the headline: “Command your craft”. By 2023, Microsoft (which owns GitHub) had rebranded a dozen products – from its search chatbot to Windows and its Office software – under the Copilot name. (According to the tech news site Ars Technica, the joke inside Microsoft was that it would need a branding copilot simply to keep track of all these products.) Around the same time, “co-intelligence” entered wider use as the title of a book by prominent American AI researcher Ethan Mollick. This book, a New York Times bestseller, stretched the metaphor from product branding into a general way of talking about living alongside AI as co-worker and co-creator, sharing a form of co-intelligence. Not long after, Microsoft researcher Advait Sarkar and colleagues wrote a paper suggesting that generative AI could see one aviation metaphor, copilot, being replaced by another: autopilot. They warned that “powerful AI capabilities may lead humans to disengage from critical thinking and simply defer to AI output … causing knowledge work to go on autopilot.” Rather than sharing responsibility for the output of these models, the implication was that in an increasing number of cases, no one was really at the controls. How OpenAI’s pre-release model ‘escaped’ to launch a cyber-attack. Video: Channel 4 News. AI anthropomorphism A 2026 study found rising anthropomorphism – the assignment of human traits and emotions to non-human things – in how people view and talk about AI tools. This suggests techniques such as the “co” framing have been persuasive, not just decorative. Metaphors can make even the very unfamiliar – such as black box AI systems – seem familiar. In the case of copilot and other co-words, they are used to sell systems to industry and ordinary users in different ways. Google DeepMind’s Co-Scientist, for example, is framed as a research partner even though it operates as something closer to a team of AI agents working with minimal oversight. Perhaps tellingly, Mollick’s follow-up to Co-Intelligence, due out in October 2026, is entitled Co-Existence: The Next Phase of AI. This might indicate that the conversation has moved from whether to how we should live alongside something that is now established beyond the power of human control. Three years ago, computer scientists Abigail Sellen and Eric Horvitz – who also have key roles within Microsoft – called for “designs for human-AI partnership that cede ultimate control and responsibility to the human user as pilot, with the AI co-pilot acting in a well-defined supporting role”. But that view of human-AI interaction already feels outdated. Recently, during an internal evaluation by US company Open AI, a pre-release AI model managed to hack into another platform in an incident variously described as the AI agent “escaping” or “going rogue”. Once again, there is a linguistic point to note here. By portraying AI agents as autonomous actors, such language points the finger of blame towards the agent, rather than the companies who build and operate them. This article contains links to bookshop.org. If you click a link and go on to buy something from bookshop.org, The Conversation UK may earn a commission.