Why Do You Say "Thank You" to AI? Paper Proposes Embodied Hijack Hypothesis
MacrinePhD · x · 2026-08-10
People often naturally anthropomorphize AI systems or say "thank you" to them. According to a new paper, this isn't foolish behavior—your Pleistocene brain is being "hijacked."
The authors introduce the Embodied Hijack Hypothesis. For 200,000 years of human evolution, linguistic fluency has been intrinsically bound to an embodied, vulnerable, self-maintaining physical body. However, Large Language Models (LLMs) break this evolutionary rule by decoupling fluency from physical embodiment, effectively co-opting human social cognition.
The paper argues that the key to achieving epistemic alignment lies not in "user re-education," but rather in optimizing UI design to address this cognitive mismatch.
Related event: Why We Say 'Thank You' to AI: The Embodied Hijacking Hypothesis(2 posts)→
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