The code golem: why do we anthropomorphize AI?
AI can’t feel, understand, or think, yet it convinces us that it does all that. We talk to it as if it were human, attributing thoughts, emotions, and even will to it. Why do we have this need?
Artificial intelligence is like seeing double in a weird way. On one hand, we understand that the so-called AI (especially generative language models) is essentially sophisticated mathematical machinery. These are stochastic, probabilistic systems that operate on thousands of graphic processors that digest petabytes of data through complex transformative algorithms.
On the other hand, these same systems, which are essentially sophisticated calculators of the next token probability, convince us of their almost human nature. We talk to them as if they were someone, not something. We attribute to them intentions, emotions and personality. We see in them something akin to human intelligence, even though we know it’s just an illusion emerging from billions of calculations.
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