To help mortgage professionals keep up with a flood of new AI jargon, the Mortgage Industry Standards Maintenance Organization has released a draft glossary of 42 terms — from “algorithm” to “hallucination.”
The list is an effort to standardize the meaning of words and phrases that are increasingly part of everyday speech for professionals across the mortgage industry.
The list includes both familiar terms like “chatbot” and more technical concepts such as “vector database” and “AI alignment,” a reference to how well machine objectives align with human intent.
“This glossary serves as a growing collection of key AI terms and definitions to foster a shared language and mutual understanding among all mortgage stakeholders,” said Rick Hill, acting MISMO president, in a statement. “As AI technology continues to evolve, new concepts, methodologies, and terminologies emerge. This resource will be regularly updated to reflect the latest advancements.”
After the 30-day comment period, MISMO plans to finalize and publish the glossary on its website as a reference tool for members and stakeholders.
Among the more provocative terms MISMO defines are “deep fake,” “guardrails,” and “hallucination” — a nod to growing concerns about fraud, misinformation, and bias. AI-generated impersonations have already surfaced in real estate scams, and experts have raised alarms about the technology’s potential to reinforce discriminatory patterns in lending.
A 2024 paper from consultancy BlackFin Group, for example, warned that without clear standards, AI tools could inadvertently embed systemic bias into automated decision-making. MISMO’s glossary aims to give the industry a baseline vocabulary to discuss — and eventually regulate — such risks.
