Paper short abstract:

This paper will explore the controversy around “anthropomorphic” AI as staged by in expert discourses and compare this to how communities of practice stage their experiences of anthropomorphic-AI crises. It will explore a praxeological approach as a way to “unfreeze” controversies around AI.

Paper long abstract:

Anthropomorphic AI has been controversial in the computer science community since the Turing test (Natale 2021). Since the advent of LLMs, experts across academia and journalism have criticized, problematized, and occasionally advocated the anthropomorphization of AIs (Li and Suh 2021). These discourses concentrate on the public understanding about AI’s technical workings, cognitive-behavioral outcomes, and sometimes even the merit of ascribing human-like qualities to machines. While experts stress the stakes of anthropomorphization in ethical AI, there has been little consensus on what it means in situated practice (cf. Marres 2020). This paper will use digital methods to conduct two comparative controversy mappings. First, it will map the expert discourse around the anthropomorphic AI controversy across popular science, popular journalism, and academia. It will ask: what risks, challenges, and stakes do experts stage around anthropomorphic AI? What solutions do they propose? Then, it will compare this controversy map with existing research conducted on a specific crisis of anthropomorphic AI – the Replika AI sexualized content crises. This controversy map stages user, popular culture, and corporate staging of the risk of a situated instance of anthropomorphic AI. By comparing these two findings, this paper will demonstrate the distance or alignment between the expert voices prioritized in popular AI debates and the communities of practice actually engaging with it. It will demonstrate how a praxeological (Burkhardt et al. 2022) approach can help unfreeze (Dandurand, McKelvey, and Roberge 2023) controversies about AI and challenge AI’s “uncontroversial ‘thingness’ ” (Suchman 2023) by situating it in its ethnographic context.