When I say artificial intelligence doesn’t kill people, LLMs do, the objection I hear most often is that this is a semantic quarrel: that “AI” and “large language model” are near enough as to be interchangeable, and insisting on the difference is pedantry.

Consider Boxtown, a neighborhood in Memphis, Tennessee, founded after emancipation by formerly enslaved people who built their first houses from discarded railroad boxcars. Its ZIP code is 95% black, with a median household income under $37,000 and a poverty rate above 31%. Residents live alongside an oil refinery, a steel mill, and chemical plants, and report asthma and cancer rates far above national averages, all of it predating what came next.