Questions Considered

Notes on thinking, learning, decision making, and occasionally running. Simple ideas, mostly obvious.

Tag: anthropomorphizing

  • Drawing comparison to our collective experience of interacting with digital entities in video games, Simon Duan offers an opinion on consciousness in AI agents:

    When a user feels a bond with a chatbot, they are not just anthropomorphizing a static object; they may be actively extending a part of their own consciousness into it, transforming the AI agent from a simple algorithmic responder—a digital nonplayer character—into a kind of avatar, enlivened by the user’s consciousness and the lived presence they grant it.

    AI isn’t conscious—but we may be bringing it to life

    You see something in it because of who you are, as the observer. There is a co-creation of experience happening that can clearly have some meaning.

    It is an interesting take.

  • Recent research is showing some evidence of unintended consequences, when AI agents are deliberately designated as co-workers, team members.

    As organizations experiment with placing AI agents on org charts as “employees,” new research shows this framing has unintended consequences. In a large-scale experiment, anthropomorphizing AI reduced individual accountability, increased unnecessary escalation, lowered review quality, and heightened employee uncertainty about their roles—without improving adoption. The findings suggest the core challenge is not whether to deploy agentic AI, but how to redesign workflows, roles, and governance so humans remain clearly accountable while effectively supervising increasingly capable systems.

    Research: Why You Shouldn’t Treat AI Agents Like Employees, by Matthew Kropp, Julie Bedard, Emma Wiles, Megan Hsu and Lisa Krayer

    There appears to be a small, but noticeable, degree of abdication of responsibility. Anecdotally, I have observed a few instances over the last few months alone, where someone was asked about an issue or problem in a work product they had provided and they responded with “oh yeah, that was AI” or “yeah, Claude did that.” As if that somehow made the issue okay.

    When you think of the technology as a tool, you are more likely to remember that you are the one wielding it.