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Our human habit of anthropomorphizing everything

Should we be anthropomorphizing AI?

Daley Wilhelm
UX Collective
8 min readMar 28, 2024

A robotic arm holds a wine glass and toasts it with another human hand holding a wine glass.
Is tech your friend? Of course. Should we treat it as such? Uhhh… Photo by Pavel Danilyuk: https://www.pexels.com/photo/a-robot-holding-a-wine-8439094/

Humans anthropomorphize everything. We assign human traits and emotions to animals, inanimate objects, and even software.

“Gmail is acting finicky today.”

“I swear my cat threw up on the rug just to spite me.”

“Siri can be so dumb sometimes.”

The reality is that animal behavior doesn’t always correlate to human behavior. Software and AI don’t “behave” at all, but rather function in accordance with their code. Humans, as social animals, find it easy to interpret certain outputs as “behaviors.” Humanizing the tech we use makes it a little bit more understandable.

But anthropomorphizing things can go wrong. Rather than making complex systems like AI more understandable, anthropomorphizing tech can actually contribute to further mystification and misunderstanding.

A definition of anthropomorphism by ChatGPT.
ChatGPT helpfully (and ironically) defines anthropomorphism. Image from — https://muddyum.net/clever-alternative-responses-to-chatgpts-huh-946c398ae18

What does anthropomorphizing look like?

During a qualitative usability study of ChatGPT, the Nielsen Norman Group observed four patterns of user behavior that assigned human…

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Published in UX Collective

We believe designers are thinkers as much as they are makers. Curated stories on UX, Visual & Product Design. https://linktr.ee/uxc

Written by Daley Wilhelm

A fiction writer turned UX writer dedicated to crisp copy, inclusive experiences, and humanizing tech.

Responses (6)

What are your thoughts?

Thanks for sharing your perspective on this issue. I have to disagree though. First of all, AI is not just code - it includes a huge amount of lamguage data that has our social norms baked into it, so we can't treat it as an algorithm. Beyond that…

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Good essay and thoughts Daley. From a cultural anthropology perspective, we have subtly changed the dialectic between humans and machines. We now more often refer to ourselves in machine terms, such as "oh, that doesn't compute" or "he's a real…

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Chatting with AI in a companionable way can help alleviate loneliness and be comforting in the same way that readers enjoy fictional characters. Even if they aren’t “real,” the feelings...

This is an interesting point. Brands will likely need to consider this in their brand identity and customer/user AI touchpoints. If the AI elicits negative emotions, that could be a detriment to the brand and vice versa.

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