The Double-Edged Sword of Anthropomorphism in LLMs
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humans may have evolved to be "hyperactive agency detectors". Upon hearing a rustle in a pile of leaves, it would be safer to assume that an agent, like a lion, hides beneath (even if there may ultimately be nothing there). Can this evolutionary cognitive mechanism-and related mechanisms of anthropomorphism-explain some of people's contemporary experience with using chatbots (e.g., ChatGPT, Gemini)? In this paper, we sketch how such mechanisms may engender the seemingly irresistible anthropomorphism of large language-based chatbots. We then explore the implications of this within the educational context. Specifically, we argue that people's tendency to perceive a "mind in the machine" is a double-edged sword for educational progress: Though anthropomorphism can facilitate motivation and learning, it may also lead students to trust-and potentially over-trust-content generated by chatbots. To be sure, students do seem to recognize that LLM-generated content may, at times, be inaccurate. We argue, however, that the rise of anthropomorphism towards chatbots will only serve to further camouflage these inaccuracies. We close by considering how research can turn towards aiding students in becoming digitally literate-avoiding the pitfalls caused by perceiving agency and humanlike mental states in chatbots.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.024 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".