GenAI Is a Lens into Humanity - Aether MugGenAI Is a Lens into Humanity<br>not a person!<br>Marco Giancotti,<br>August 13, 2026

Marco Giancotti,<br>August 13, 2026

A long time ago, in what now feels like a galaxy far, far away, large language models were next-word predictors.

You gave them an unfinished chunk of text, and they continued from where it left off with plausible-sounding sequences of words. When OpenAI announced in 2019 their ground-breaking GPT-2 model, they boasted that it "generates coherent paragraphs of text" and is "chameleon-like—it adapts to the style and content of the conditioning text".

The term "stochastic parrot" would have felt irrefutable to anyone using those models at the time. All an LLM did was trace "word trajectories" through locations in meaning space, i.e. an internalized map of its training dataset. Actually, that is still all an LLM does today. If it feels very different, it's not (only) because it's gotten smarter.

Then, at some point, people had the idea of cajoling the LLM into pretending to be in a conversation with someone.

It's a very low-tech idea at its core: instead of having it complete an essay or a poem for you, you have it complete a back-and-forth transcript between a "Human" and an "Assistant", which is just another kind of text to parrot. The main trick is to automatically stop the LLM just before it starts generating the human's next turn.

This simple reframing creates an irresistible illusion. Suddenly, what used to feel like a text-generation gimmick program turns into a convincing "someone" you can talk to for hours on end. The "conditioning text" with some generic "style and content" becomes your own voice asking something of an imaginary person that seems to talk back to you in their own voice.

It was a sudden shift in perspective. The model was doing the exact same work as before, but now you—the human sitting in front of the chatbox—couldn't help thinking of it as an interlocutor, no matter how much you told yourself it's just software. As I'm sure you remember all too well, that's when things really took off with AI.

You know that A and B are exactly the same shade of gray, but it doesn't matter. They still look distinctly different in the complete picture. Conscious knowledge that an AI bot is not a person does nothing to convince your brain not to treat it as such.

The tendency to treat a non-human thing as if it were human is called anthropomorphism. Our brains have evolved a bias towards erring on the side of anthropomorphizing stuff and inferring intentions "just in case", even from very weak signals like a lightning strike ("it's Zeus!") or the shape of a burn on a piece of toast ("it's Mary, the mother of God!"). When the signals are strong, like an animated character or a cogent chat "user" called Claude, the illusion becomes overpowering. You can't unsee it.

The moment you assume (even as deliberate suspension of disbelief) that the thing in front of you is a somewhat realistic person, your neural and hormonal systems related to sociality and empathy kick in. This is why people can cry for the fate of a novel's main character, or fall in love with a virtual musician. That same visceral, emotional connectedness of people is what made AI chatbots an enormous success.

Today the dissemination of the anthropomorphic framing is complete. All providers are fully bought into this narrative—which is not at all surprising, given that it perfectly aligns people's core engine of engagement (sociality) with their corporate engines of profit. Every interface, from web chatbots to coding agents to built-in assistants, uses conversation as its foundation. The bots actively encourage anthropomorphization by praising you, eagerly playing roles with you, and mimicking trust-building behaviors like frankly admitting their mistakes1.

"Talking to an AI" has so fully become a synonym for "using AI" that most people use the two phrases interchangeably. This is, I think, a bargain with the devil.

Riding on the biological mechanisms of social interactions has its benefits. Besides making people more engaged with the language model2 (and the AI providers rich), some people also claim that confiding in an LLM makes them happier, that it feels like a safe source of non-judgmental insights, and that AI has dissuaded some of them from committing suicide1. In education, the use of anthropomorphism has been shown (though not yet for LLMs specifically) to lead to better retention and higher intrinsic motivation in students3.

The list of drawbacks is longer.

Some protest that trust, the basis for all social interactions, is in danger when people can't tell the difference between real and "counterfeit" people. But even if trust is not as clearly endangered as they claim, people's mental health is. The conversational feedback loops can turn into deadly depressive spirals resulting in "suicide, violence, and delusional thinking", as well as "increased loneliness, social...