Anthropomorphism is the act of ascribing human characteristics to something that is nonhuman. We’re prone to this: we see faces in the clouds, give motivations to the weather, and hold conversations with our pets. It’s no surprise, then, that we’re tempted to anthropomorphize artificial intelligence, especially since talking to LLMs feels so much like talking to a person. Even the developers and researchers who design these systems can fall into the trap of using humanlike terms to describe their creations. We say that these complex algorithms and computations “understand,” “learn,” and even
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