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Paper short abstract

Drawing on the distinct ontology of fiction and anthropological engagement with the subjunctive, this paper suggests that approaching AI systems through the lens of fiction clarifies what is counted as knowledge, authority or possibility, by foregrounding new ways of re-partitioning social worlds.

Paper long abstract

The “transhuman condition” is often framed as a crisis of definition: do machines possess intelligence, sentience, or rights? This paper shifts focus from such debates to an anthropological engagement with world-making: how people inhabit and move between different realities. Anthropology has long examined interactions with beings occupying intermediate or liminal positions (Turner 1969), such as spirits or avatars, treated as socially real without stable embodiment or fixed ontological status (Ong 1987; Boellstorff 2016). These engagements rely on social practices allowing multiple worlds to coexist without collapsing into one another.

Drawing on an account of fiction as a “re-partitioning” of reality (Pavel 1986), and anthropological work on the subjunctive (Strassler 2010; Driver 1988), this paper approaches AI systems as a form of “as if” interaction embedded in technological infrastructures. Like fictional worlds, AI systems invite users to interact as if they were addressing a conscious interlocutor. Yet, unlike fiction, these interactions operate continuously within everyday systems rather than bounded narrative domains, obscuring the cues that ordinarily signal how fictional worlds are entered and exited.

Focusing on large language models, the paper argues that the lens of fiction reveals how AI systems extend “as if” interactions into everyday life, altering how people move between possible worlds. Building on anthropological studies of non-human entities, the paper highlights a growing risk, namely that the practices through which possible worlds are ordinarily recognised are harder to sustain. On this account, “intelligence” in the transhuman era concerns sustaining workable distinctions between simulated and everyday social life.