Anthropomorphism

The Cue Sheet No.47 Barry Power | June 2026

Jul 10, 2026

AI is a term that actually dates back to the 1950s, and our impression of what this technology actually is comes from a combination of science fiction and clever marketing to help us believe it’s something it really isn’t. A group of scientists coined it to raise money from the US military. They got the money. This was before proper electronic computers, before integrated circuits, back when computing was electromechanical. And still, that’s the name we’ve inherited seventy-odd years later for whatever this current wave is.

I’m changing how I use terms around this software, for that is what it is. Software. Granted, software which is excellent at predicting patterns and generating predicted outcomes. But it is not your therapist, your wife, or your friend.

The simple truth is that AI as a term is misrepresenting what is essentially very advanced software. We’ve given it a name and adopted it as a pet, but really in the same way as Tom Hanks adopted Wilson in Castaway. And this isn’t a new trick. In the 1960s, a scientist called Joseph Weizenbaum built a piece of mainframe software he called Eliza, styled as a Rogerian therapist. It did next to nothing — mostly it just reflected your own words back at you as a question. He built it to show how easily people could be fooled by simple pattern-matching. His own secretary got so attached to it that she asked him to leave the room so she could talk to it in private. That’s the 1960s. We’ve been doing this to ourselves for sixty years. The tech has gotten a lot better since. We haven’t.

Pareidolia is the phenomenon where humans find the appearance of a face in inanimate objects around us. Jesus on our toast, a smiley face in a barn, Kurt Cobain in the knot of a tree. We’re hardwired to give human features to all kinds of things, and there’s a decent evolutionary reason for it — spot the face in the treeline half a second before the other fella does, and you’re the one who gets to run first. That trait didn’t switch off because we invented software.

This predilection, unfortunately, is the basket where all the big tech companies are putting their eggs. It doesn’t help that we’ve spent sixty years being fed the same handful of stories about what this technology supposedly is — HAL turning on the crew, Skynet, Ultron, Jarvis. Ask most people what AI is and they’ll describe a movie character, not a piece of software. That confusion isn’t an accident. It’s useful to the people selling it.

Engagement is the only metric these companies can show their investors at the moment, because it certainly isn’t profit. None of them are anywhere near profitable with this tech. The cracks in the revolution are, at least for me, beginning to show. These companies are using the social media engagement playbook to hook people. Every idea you propose is amazing, every prompt is the best anyone has ever prompted. The ultimate tireless sycophant. And it’s by design, not accident — when one of the big labs tried dialling the sycophancy back recently, people didn’t thank them for it. They rioted. Grown adults posting online, in tears, delighted to have “their buddy” back once the flattery got switched on again. That’s not a relationship with software. That’s a design choice working exactly as intended, on exactly the people it was built to work on.

This is not to say I don’t feel this technology is valuable or revolutionary. I feel the true impact may still remain to be seen. But I have a growing feeling of confidence that we are not coming towards Judgement Day just yet.

Credit where it’s due: a good few of the ideas here, particularly the AI naming history and the sycophancy point, were sparked by a talk Richard Campbell gave at NDC — worth watching in full if this piece has you thinking.

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Coffee and Composing — YouTube

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