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The dangerous illusion that AI understands, thinks and cares

Anthropomorphising artificial intelligence systems as though they possess human emotions, intentions, consciousness or moral judgment is both an ethical and practical problem, warns a new analysis. Treating AI as humanlike risks deceiving vulnerable users and obscuring the technology's true limitations, as generative AI systems merely process data statistically without genuine understanding. The foremost ethical concern is deception, as referring to AI as a noun elevates it to a form of intelligence on par with humans, when in reality it is only a machine.

read2 min views1 publishedJul 23, 2026
The dangerous illusion that AI understands, thinks and cares
Image: Scmp (auto-discovered)

The foremost ethical concern is deception. Treating AI systems as humanlike risks the lives of vulnerable people

Anthropomorphising artificial intelligence – that is, treating AI systems as though they possess human emotions, intentions, consciousness or moral judgment – is both an ethical and a practical problem. While attributing human qualities to AI systems may make interactions more approachable, it also risks clouding users’ perceptions of the technology’s true nature and limitations.

hallucinationsthat generative AI systems produce are nothing more than errors and inaccuracies. Until recently, AI has been used as an adjective, as in AI systems. But it is now common parlance to refer to an AI system as a noun, such as: the AI.

The vocabulary choice has elevated AI systems to some form of intelligence on a par with, or even surpassing, human intelligence. It is true that in some cases, their processing powers and prowess surpass those of humans – but they also fail spectacularly because they are only machines.

Since the industrial revolution, it has been accepted that machines can be more efficient than humans at certain tasks. But we did not refer to machinery as teammates back then; neither should we now with AI systems.

generative AI, like many computer programs and algorithms, excels at processing data – keyword searches, finding data patterns and sequences as well as comparing, matching and combining data are all done far more quickly than any human can. Add statistical analysis and mathematics, and we have a semblance of intelligence – but not true intelligence.

Text-based generative AI systems are trained on vast amounts of texts. Given the word “thank”, it can statistically calculate the extremely high probability of the next word being “you”, and that is what it generates. Similarly, if asked to finish the sentence “the cat sat on the”, the most probable answer would be “mat”.

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