The dangerous illusion that AI understands, thinks and cares

Hannah Yee-Fen Lim is an associate professor of business law at Nanyang Technological University, where she is AI governance lead and faculty affiliate at the Global Institute of Finance, Technology and Society.Anthropomorphising Artificial Intelligence – that is, treating AI systems as though they possess human emotions, intentions, consciousness or moral judgment – is both an ethical and a practical problem. While attributing human qualities to AI systems may make interactions more approachable, it also risks clouding users’ perceptions of the technology’s true nature and limitations.Call a spade a spade. The so-called hallucinations that generative AI systems produce are nothing more than errors and inaccuracies. Until recently, AI has been used as an adjective, as in AI systems. But it is now common parlance to refer to an AI system as a noun, such as: the AI.The vocabulary choice has elevated AI systems to some form of intelligence on a par with, or even surpassing, human intelligence. It is true that in some cases, their processing powers and prowess surpass those of humans – but they also fail spectacularly because they are only machines.