GoKawiilCory Doctorow critiques anthropomorphizing of Claude and other AI chatbots
In a new essay, writer Cory Doctorow argues that people project intention and meaning onto AI systems like Anthropic's Claude much as religious believers see purpose in a sunset. He suggests this instinct to read agency into statistical text generators is a kind of collective delusion rather than evidence of genuine understanding inside the machine.
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As AI chatbots become embedded in daily life, how the public interprets their outputs shapes trust, regulation, and commercial hype around these tools. Doctorow's argument pushes back against narratives of emergent AI consciousness, framing such claims as a human perceptual bias rather than a technical breakthrough.
- Doctorow compares AI hallucination narratives to religious meaning-making in nature.
- The essay argues users, not machines, are the ones projecting false intentionality onto AI.
- The piece is part of a broader critique of hype surrounding large language models like Claude.
Source: pluralistic.net, 2026-09-21
Published there as: “The Claude Delusion”
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