Critiquing the Concept of AI Over-Anthropomorphism
fkasummer · x · 2026-07-14
This repost discusses a term coined by an author, Hyperanthromorphism, which refers to the tendency of overly assigning pseudo-human qualities to AI technologies.
The core argument is that treating complex capabilities like "persuasiveness, discernment, and charisma" as a single infinitely scalable scalar is a fundamentally flawed problem definition. The author criticizes a certain "doomsday" reasoning path within AI safety circles: abstracting a human trait into an inherent internal metric, assuming it can be infinitely enhanced, and then extrapolating AI's future based on that.
Using "superhuman persuasiveness" as an example, the author argues this is an imprecise or even "not even wrong" framing, as it presupposes that "persuasiveness" is an attribute that can be directly attributed to an agent.
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