
Anthropomorphising artificial intelligence – that is, treating AI systems as if they have human emotions, intentions, consciousness or moral judgment – is an ethical and practical problem. While incorporating human characteristics into AI systems can make interactions more accessible, it also risks blurring users’ perceptions of the true nature and limitations of the technology.
Vocabulary choice has elevated AI systems to a kind of intelligence that matches, or even exceeds, human intelligence. It’s true that in some cases, their processing power and skill exceed that of humans – but they also fail largely because they’re just machines.
Since the industrial revolution, it has been accepted that machines can be more efficient than humans at certain tasks. But we didn’t refer to machines as teammates back then; nor should we now with AI systems.
Text-based AI systems are trained on large amounts of text. Given the word “thank you”, it can statistically calculate the very high probability of the next word being “you”, and that’s the result. Similarly, if asked to finish the sentence “the cat sat”, the most likely answer would be “mat”.




