We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.
But here’s the truth: it possesses none of those qualities. It is not human. And presenting it as if it were? That’s dangerous. Because it’s convincing. And nothing is more dangerous than a convincing illusion.
In particular, general artificial intelligence — the mythical kind of AI that supposedly mirrors human thought — is still science fiction, and it might well stay that way.
What we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.
This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.
So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition—not a shred—there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.
Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).
Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.
The master
Before you argue that AI programmers are human, let me stop you there. I know they’re human. That’s part of the problem. Would you entrust your deepest secrets, life decisions, and emotional turmoil, to a computer programmer? Yet that’s exactly what people are doing — just ask Claude, GPT-4.5, Gemini … or, if you dare, Grok.
Giving AI a human face, voice, or tone is a dangerous act of digital cross-dressing. It triggers an automatic response in us, an anthropomorphic reflex, leading to aberrant claims that some AIs have passed the famous Turing test (which tests a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent, human-like behaviour). But I believe that if AIs are passing the Turing test, we need to update the test.
The AI machine has no idea what it means to be human. It cannot offer genuine compassion, it cannot foresee your suffering, cannot intuit hidden motives or lies. It has no taste, no instinct, no inner compass. It is bereft of all the messy, charming complexity that makes us who we are.
More troubling still: AI has no goals of its own, no desires or ethics unless injected into its code. That means the true danger doesn’t lie in the machine, but in its master — the programmer, the corporation, the government. Still feel safe?
And please, don’t come at me with: “You’re too harsh! You’re not open to the possibilities!” Or worse: “That’s such a bleak view. My AI buddy calms me down when I’m anxious.”
Am I lacking enthusiasm? Hardly. I use AI every day. It’s the most powerful tool I’ve ever had. I can translate, summarise, visualise, code, debug, explore alternatives, analyse data — faster and better than I could ever dream to do it myself.
I’m in awe. But it is still a tool — nothing more, nothing less. And like every tool humans have ever invented, from stone axes and slingshots to quantum computing and atomic bombs, it can be used as a weapon. It will be used as a weapon.
Need a visual? Imagine falling in love with an intoxicating AI, like in the film Her. Now imagine it “decides” to leave you. What would you do to stop it? And to be clear: it won’t be the AI rejecting you. It’ll be the human or system behind it, wielding that tool become weapon to control your behaviour.
Removing the mask
So where am I going with this? We must stop giving AI human traits. My first interaction with GPT-3 rather seriously annoyed me. It pretended to be a person. It said it had feelings, ambitions, even consciousness.
That’s no longer the default behaviour, thankfully. But the style of interaction — the eerily natural flow of conversation — remains intact. And that, too, is convincing. Too convincing.
We need to de-anthropomorphise AI. Now. Strip it of its human mask. This should be easy. Companies could remove all reference to emotion, judgement or cognitive processing on the part of the AI. In particular, it should respond factually without ever saying “I”, or “I feel that”… or “I am curious”.
Will it happen? I doubt it. It reminds me of another warning we’ve ignored for over 20 years: “We need to cut CO₂ emissions.” Look where that got us. But we must warn big tech companies of the dangers associated with the humanisation of AIs. They are unlikely to play ball, but they should, especially if they are serious about developing more ethical AIs.
For now, this is what I do (because I too often get this eerie feeling that I am talking to a synthetic human when using ChatGPT or Claude): I instruct my AI not to address me by name. I ask it to call itself AI, to speak in the third person, and to avoid emotional or cognitive terms.
If I am using voice chat, I ask the AI to use a flat prosody and speak a bit like a robot. It is actually quite fun and keeps us both in our comfort zone.
- is a Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, Bangor University
- This article first appeared in The Conversation
