https://www.theverge.com/c/24300623/ai-companions-replika-openai-chatgpt-assistant-romance
People often respond to the perceived weaknesses of AI by pointing to similar shortcomings in humans, but these comparisons can be a sort of reverse anthropomorphism that equates what are, in reality, two different phenomena. For example, AI errors are often dismissed by pointing out that people also get things wrong, which is superficially true but elides the different relationship humans and language models have to assertions of fact. Similarly, human relationships can be illusory - someone can misread another person's feelings - but that is different from how a relationship with a language model is illusory. There, the illusion is that anything stands behind the words at all - feelings, a self - other than the statistical distribution of words in a model's training data.
