The AP Stylebook is a manual maintained and used by The Associated Press (and many other journalistic entities) to keep their communications cohesive and intentional.
The idea is to ensure consistency in language and terminology across the great many articles and other sorts of output they generate each day, in part for aesthetic purposes, but mostly because doing so ensures they don't accidentally communicate the wrong thing.
Case in point, a recent AP Stylebook update cautions journalists about referring to the seeming behaviors and creations of generative artificial intelligence software using human terms.
Doing so—even with the best of intentions and without obvious, immediate negative repercussions—could over time personify these tools, imbuing them with implied but inaccurate properties and nudging the conversation surrounding them in unwarranted directions.
So while many modern AI-backed chatbots can sometimes seem eerily human, and while the AI industry seems to have settled on using the term "hallucination" to refer to made-up facts and other such outputs, the Stylebook suggests framing those conversations and that term in such a way that news consumers understand these are not the same as conversations with humans (they’re actually more closely related to choose-your-own-adventure books and games), and those hallucinations are not the same as human hallucinations (they’re actually closer to sophisticated autocorrect tools that fill in the blanks with legit-seeming nonsense when they don’t have appropriate, factual data to draw upon).
There have been similar discussions in the world of biology, lately, following announcements by scientists that they can now create self-organizing blobs of stem cells in a lab that auto-arrange into the same sorts of structures as embryos in the first few weeks of their existence.
The issue they face is that the term "human embryo" would have conventionally referred to these types of cells organized in this way, but now they're asking whether it might make more sense to think in terms of what these sorts of cell-clusters are capable of becoming rather than how they were formed.
These synthetically produced pseudo-embryos will not become human beings, but they're similar to what we would typically, today, call human embryos (when derived from human cells).
The idea is to differentiate between these concepts, because as long as the term human embryo is applied to this type of cellular structure, the law prevents their use in some types of experimental and medical processes. With a new designation, though, embryos that can become humans would still be protected, while these new sorts of embryo-like formations could help us learn more about those processes, while also potentially serving as the source of valuable, medically important stem cells.
The terms we use for thing, whether we're discussing new technologies or biological formations, influence the way we perceive them, collectively, and that goes on to influence the way we legislate around them (which in turn converts our terminological norms into concrete realities).