Please join us on Tuesday, December 2nd at 5 pm for “Anthropomorphism and Human-AI Relations” with Dr. Ali Hasan (University of Iowa).

** Updated Location: Longs Peak Room in the Lory Student Center (rm 302)

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.

Dr. Ali Hasan is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Iowa. He has broad interests in philosophy, including epistemology (his primary area of research), ethics, philosophy of mind, history of modern philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Recently, he’s also been working on ethical and epistemological issues in AI.