RFI Associate Vice President Nathan Berkeley commented last week at Christian Scholar’s Review on a growing trend among journalists, industry experts, tech executives, and individual users to speak about artificial intelligence (AI) in ways that suggest it possesses genuine human qualities. “As the capabilities of AI have increased,” Berkeley observes,

the discourse around it has begun to shift from viewing the technology as merely a powerful tool to describing it as some new sort of agent in the world. Proponents of this view talk about AI in ways that obscure its limits by attributing to it uniquely human capacities. They do so because they misunderstand the created nature of human freedom and reason that can never apply to AI functions. The spiritual, psychological, moral, and social repercussions of this rhetorical error could be devastating over time if left unchecked.

Beyond the dire practical consequences, we must fulfill our obligation to speak truthfully. Language that anthropomorphizes AI is dangerously misleading, not because such rhetoric is prima facie absurd (though in some respects it is absurd) but because of how impressive the technology is even in its infancy, displaying functions that mimic some distinctly human traits in unprecedented ways.

Read the full article: “Our Words Must Reflect the Sacred Divide Between Human Action and AI Function.”