this post was submitted on 10 Oct 2026
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Well let's temper our disappointment in people, it's not like googly eyes are comparable to the LLMs ability to respond to human speech with incredibly lucid and more or less original responses. One can be forgiven I think for anthropomorphizing one and not the other. Particularly given how MUCH cultural thought and imagination has been bent toward the idea of thinking machines over the last couple of centuries. It's deep down in the zeitgeist.
I may have expressed myself poorly, then, because my point was that people were anthropomorphizing the pencil with googly eyes just the same as they are now with AI. It's not that I blame people for doing what they are innately, biologically programmed to do (form social bonds), it's that people are so blindly against AI that they'll accept wildly incorrect assumptions like (quoting a friend here) "they made an AI work a retail job and it wanted to kill itself" without examining what's at play, like the people who were momentarily horrified that the professor snapped the pencil in half.