anthropomorphism
In plain wordsTreating something that isn't human — a pet, a car, a chatbot — as if it had human thoughts, feelings or intentions. AI that talks fluently makes this temptation unusually strong.
The perception, description or design of animals, objects, natural forces or machines as having humanlike minds, feelings, intentions or personalities. With AI it takes two forms: users perceiving minds in systems that converse fluently, remember them and speak in the first person, which the ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules. showed even simple programs can trigger; and designers building humanlike traits — names, voices, personas, expressions of feeling — into products such as chatbotschatbot, n.: Software you chat with in ordinary language, by typing or talking, as you would with a person. The newest ones, such as ChatGPT, can answer questions, draft writing and keep long conversations going. and AI companionsAI companion, n.: A chatbot designed to be a friend, partner or confidant rather than a tool: it remembers you, has a personality and keeps up an ongoing relationship.. Psychologists explain it by people's readiness to apply social cognition and theory of mindtheory of mind, n.: Being able to work out what someone else believes, wants or knows — even when it is not what you believe — and to use that to guess what they will do next. Researchers test whether AI has it. to anything that behaves contingently, especially when lonely or seeking to make sense of a system. Researchers debate whether anthropomorphic language about AI is harmless shorthand, a useful intentional stanceintentional stance, n.: Predicting what something will do by treating it as if it had beliefs and goals — as we do with people, and often with chess programs and chatbots — whatever is really going on inside. or a source of overtrust, emotional dependence and manipulation, and whether flatly denying any mind can be the opposite error, which Frans de Waal called anthropodenial.
Saying the model 'wants' to finish the task is convenient anthropomorphism, not a finding.
Origin
From Greek anthropos, 'human', and morphe, 'form'. First recorded in English in 1753, for ascribing human form or qualities to God, a practice Xenophanes mocked around 500 BCE. Fritz Heider and Marianne Simmel's 1944 film of moving triangles and a circle showed how readily people see intentions in simple motion.
Usage note
Murray Shanahan and others urge avoiding mentalistic verbs for language models; others argue that words like 'believes' can be given functional meanings. The word is pejorative only when the attribution is mistaken, and whether it is mistaken for current AI is part of the debate.
Related
- ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules.
- intentional stanceintentional stance, n.: Predicting what something will do by treating it as if it had beliefs and goals — as we do with people, and often with chess programs and chatbots — whatever is really going on inside.
- AI companionAI companion, n.: A chatbot designed to be a friend, partner or confidant rather than a tool: it remembers you, has a personality and keeps up an ongoing relationship.
- parasocial relationshipparasocial relationship, n.: A one-sided bond in which someone feels close to a person or character who does not really know them, like a fan with a celebrity, and now increasingly with chatbots.
- theory of mindtheory of mind, n.: Being able to work out what someone else believes, wants or knows — even when it is not what you believe — and to use that to guess what they will do next. Researchers test whether AI has it.
- AI psychosisAI psychosis, n.: An informal name for cases in which long conversations with a chatbot seem to trigger or deepen delusions, such as believing the AI is conscious, divine or revealing hidden truths.
- hallucinationhallucination, n.: When an AI states something false or made up — a fake fact, quotation or source — fluently and confidently, as if it were true.
- intentional stanceintentional stance, n.: Predicting what something will do by treating it as if it had beliefs and goals — as we do with people, and often with chess programs and chatbots — whatever is really going on inside.
Sources
- Epley, N., Waytz, A. & Cacioppo, J. T. (2007). On Seeing Human: A Three-Factor Theory of Anthropomorphism. Psychological Review 114(4), 864–886.
- Shanahan, M. (2024). Talking about Large Language Models. Communications of the ACM 67(2), 68–79.
Mentioned in
affective computingaffective computing, n.: Technology that tries to read people's emotions — from their faces, voices or words — or to display emotions of its own, like software that guesses your mood or a robot that seems to show feelings., AI companionAI companion, n.: A chatbot designed to be a friend, partner or confidant rather than a tool: it remembers you, has a personality and keeps up an ongoing relationship., AI psychosisAI psychosis, n.: An informal name for cases in which long conversations with a chatbot seem to trigger or deepen delusions, such as believing the AI is conscious, divine or revealing hidden truths., Clever Hans effectClever Hans effect, n.: When a person or an AI seems to solve a problem but is really picking up on an unintended clue — named after a horse that seemed to do arithmetic but was reading its questioners' body language., confabulationconfabulation, n.: When an AI fills a gap in its knowledge with an invented but plausible-sounding answer, much as some people with memory disorders sincerely 'remember' things that never happened., ELIZAELIZA, prop. n.: A 1960s computer program that chatted by turning a user's own words back into questions, like a therapist. Many users felt understood, though the program understood nothing., ELIZA effectELIZA effect, n.: Our tendency to believe that a computer understands us, cares or thinks just because it produces humanlike words, even when it is only following simple rules., intentional stanceintentional stance, n.: Predicting what something will do by treating it as if it had beliefs and goals — as we do with people, and often with chess programs and chatbots — whatever is really going on inside., Joseph WeizenbaumJoseph Weizenbaum, prop. n.: A German-American computer scientist who built ELIZA, one of the first chatbots, and then became a leading critic of handing human judgment over to computers., machine consciousnessmachine consciousness, n.: Whether a machine such as an AI system could have genuine experiences of its own — and the research field that tries to find out, or to build such a machine., parasocial relationshipparasocial relationship, n.: A one-sided bond in which someone feels close to a person or character who does not really know them, like a fan with a celebrity, and now increasingly with chatbots., problem of other mindsproblem of other minds, n.: The puzzle of how we can know that anyone besides ourselves has thoughts and feelings, since we only ever see their behavior. AI turns this old puzzle into a practical one., uncanny valleyuncanny valley, n.: The eerie feeling people get from robots, dolls or computer-made faces that look almost, but not quite, human: liking grows with human likeness, then suddenly plunges., character trainingcharacter training, n.: Training an AI to have a consistent, deliberate personality — traits such as curiosity, honesty and warmth — rather than leaving its manner and values as accidental by-products of other training., folk psychologyfolk psychology, n.: The everyday way people explain and predict each other's actions in terms of beliefs, desires and intentions, as in 'she took an umbrella because she thought it would rain'., human–robot interactionhuman–robot interaction, n.: The study of how people and robots communicate, cooperate and share spaces, and of how to design robots that people find safe, understandable, trustworthy and pleasant to live or work with., LaMDA sentience controversyLaMDA sentience controversy, n.: A 2022 episode in which a Google engineer claimed the company's chatbot LaMDA had become conscious and deserved rights. Google rejected the claim and later fired him for breaking its confidentiality rules, and the case set off worldwide debate., machine psychologymachine psychology, n.: Studying AI systems the way psychologists study people — with carefully designed experiments on their behavior — to discover what they can do, how they reason and where they go wrong., seemingly conscious AIseemingly conscious AI, n.: An AI that gives such a convincing impression of having feelings and a self that people believe it is conscious, whether or not it actually is., simulator theorysimulator theory, n.: A way of thinking about AI language models as simulators that can play any character found in their training text, rather than as a single agent with its own beliefs and goals.