Anna L. Tsing, professor of anthropology at University of California-Santa Cruz, will give a public talk on The Adventures of Form. This talk is funded by a Mellon Foundation grant and part of a multi-year Distinguished Lecture Series on Race, Gender, and Ethnic Studies.

Given the way that AI models work and the way that ordinary human rationality works, it is very likely that people are anthropomorphizing AI, with potentially serious consequences. There are good reasons to doubt that today’s AI systems have anything like human understanding, and even if they have internal representations or meaningful contents in some sense, these are unlikely to correspond to our ordinary understanding of natural language. However, there are natural, and in some ways quite rational, pressures to anthropomorphize or personify AI systems in biased ways. This includes not only the classical or obvious ways of personifying AI — taking them to be sentient or have consciousness and understanding — but also taking AI to simulate or function like understanding, track the meaning of our language and our reasoning or logic, or have a model of the world our language is about. These more subtle or unobvious forms of anthropomorphism or personification raise serious, difficult ethical questions about how to manage our evolving relationship with AI.