Contribution short abstract:

This intervention discusses the proliferation of "entitifications" of artificial intelligence by reviewing some notable examples - the philosophical zombie, the stochastic parrot, and the masked shoggoth - to argue that this emerging menagerie of entities urgently demands anthropological attention.

Contribution long abstract:

A decade of development in artificial intelligence since the deep neural network breakthroughs of 2012 has introduced countless new social actors in the everyday lives of people around the globe. From technical innovations like transformer models and encoder/decoder architectures to more imaginative personifications of machine learning processes, it is undeniable that humans anthropomorphize new technologies as they attempt to make sense of them. This intervention discusses the proliferation of personifications (or perhaps more accurately, "entitifications") of artificial intelligence by reviewing some notable examples - the philosophical zombie, the stochastic parrot, and the masked shoggoth - to argue that this emerging menagerie of entities urgently demands anthropological attention. Much of anthropology relies on the long-term, dialogic engagement with the Other, and if the discipline wants to take artificial intelligence seriously it has to figure out how to also relate to these new ethnographic interlocutors - neither by reducing them to mere technological tools nor by uncritically accepting the characterizations offered by corporations or other discipines. Debates in in both cyborg anthropology and multispecies ethnography have consistently argued for the need to expand the scope of both anthropos and ethnos to other non-human actors. As automated systems not only populate societal imaginaries but also become active participants in the shaping of social worlds, I argue that it is necessary to take these new ethnographic interlocutors seriously.