This post was written by Cansu Kutay and is cross-posted from our Substack. Kindly read the description of this sequence to understand the context in which this was written.

Introduction and definitions

Anthropomorphism is “the attribution of human form, character, or attributes to non-human entities”. This concept has always complemented human efforts to understand and replicate intelligence. This tendency is exemplified in the context of AI by a human-centred approach to the design, interpretation, and perception of AI. The current blog post will examine how such anthropomorphic perspectives both enable and constrain our technological imagination of AI.

I gathered the motivation to finally put my thoughts onto paper (a Google Doc) regarding this topic after watching “How Plants Think & What It Teaches Us About Consciousness”, a documentary on YouTube exploring plant intelligence. The narrator of the documentary suggests that our understanding of what “learning” or “intelligence” is in plants is limited because of the human lens; perhaps plants think in a way that we as humans cannot fathom because we have not experienced or felt it. This translates to AI quite well. We are limited to understanding it only through our lived and subjective experience. It might be that entirely different forms of cognition or intelligence exist beyond the bounds of what we can currently conceive. Just as we may not be able to grasp the plant experience, we may not truly understand how algorithms “perceive” or “learn” either. A comment on the video really stuck with me: “There could be entire layers of perception and experience that we can’t even fathom, simply because they don’t fit within our narrow sensory framework.”

Anthropomorphism is therefore both inevitable and limiting. We can only perceive reality through our own human faculties, therefore it makes sense that we would reflect that onto other (intelligent) beings. This perspective, however, anchors both our creativity and scientific method.

Of course, it is hard to come up with or understand any sort of intelligence or thinking that isn’t our own. Perhaps the path forward is using AI to help us overcome this. By creating artificially intelligent beings, we can challenge our biases and use their emergent behaviours to illuminate new, non-human modes of cognition.

Anthropomorphism in AI

Anthropomorphism manifest...

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