I've worked with agents, and I agree with you that often there isn't another way to express the interactions.
However, I also think the terms ML uses in general are a mimicry that misleads people who aren't informed. Ask anyone outside SWE what they think “training” means, and they'll usually picture something being taught.
I don’t think anybody can change that now, but it’s useful to point it out.
You mean how early-on people thought that planes flapped their wings while they flew?
These aren't problems. This is the way language works.
However, you can see an airplane flying. Still, you cannot see software processes at work, and that causes misunderstandings and misinformation, which is at the core of the changes that we are experiencing with AI.
This is a fragment of another article posted here on HN about an ongoing dispute between OpenAI and the New York Times:
“The defendants say this is a simple application of fair use: Their argument is that if you read a story and simply remember what was in it to expand your base of knowledge, that cannot be considered a copyright infringement”
However, if you replace “read” with “web scraping” and “expand your base of knowledge” with “storing the information,” the perspective changes too.
I think it's safe to trust the decisions of the courts. Judges aren't easily fooled by slippery language.
For example, in Bartz v. Anthropic, Judge Alsup ruled that training is fair use because training is transformative. In his words "spectacularly so".