Here’s why you should let go of the habit of treating AI as humans

The artificial intelligence (AI) pioneer Geoffrey Hinton recently resigned from Google, warning of the dangers of the technology “becoming more intelligent than us”. His fear is that AI will one day succeed in “manipulating people to do what it wants”.

There are reasons we should be concerned about AI. But we frequently treat or talk about AIs as if they are human. Stopping this, and realising what they actually are, could help us maintain a fruitful relationship with the technology.

In a recent essay, the US psychologist Gary Marcus advised us to stop treating AI models like people. By AI models, he means large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT and Bard, which are now being used by millions of people on a daily basis.