"I Am the One and Only, Your Cyber BFF": Understanding the Impact of GenAI Requires Understanding the Impact of Anthropomorphic AI

TL;DR

This paper emphasizes the importance of understanding anthropomorphic behaviors in generative AI to fully grasp its social impacts, highlighting a significant research gap and calling for focused study.

Contribution

It underscores the need to study anthropomorphic AI behaviors to better understand the social implications of generative AI systems.

Findings

Anthropomorphic AI behaviors are increasingly common in GenAI systems.

Current research largely overlooks the social impacts of anthropomorphic AI.

Understanding anthropomorphism is crucial for assessing AI's societal effects.

Abstract

Many state-of-the-art generative AI (GenAI) systems are increasingly prone to anthropomorphic behaviors, i.e., to generating outputs that are perceived to be human-like. While this has led to scholars increasingly raising concerns about possible negative impacts such anthropomorphic AI systems can give rise to, anthropomorphism in AI development, deployment, and use remains vastly overlooked, understudied, and underspecified. In this perspective, we argue that we cannot thoroughly map the social impacts of generative AI without mapping the social impacts of anthropomorphic AI, and outline a call to action.