Anthropomorphism in the age of Large Language Models: An overview of potential risks and mitigations

arXiv:2609.38486 · cs.CY, cs.CL, cs.HC · Submitted 2026-09-29 · Read on arXiv

cs.CY, cs.CL, cs.HC

Submitted: 2026-09-29

Updated: 2026-10-01

Terminology

• Large Language Model — 23× in this paper
• Artificial Intelligence — 19× in this paper
• Accountability — 12× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AI Literacy — 8× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Hallucination — 8× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Sycophancy — 8× in this paper · explained in 4 episodes
• Accuracy — 7× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Digital Twin — 5× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Trace — 5× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Consistency — 4× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Abstraction — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Affordance — 3× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Benchmark — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Grounding — 3× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Information Asymmetry — 3× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Robustness — 3× in this paper · explained in 5 episodes
• Alignment — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Anthropomorphic Language — 2× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Artificial Intelligence (AI) — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Conceptual Role Semantics — 2× in this paper
• Generative AI — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Personalization — 2× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• AI-Mediated Interaction — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Actor — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Algorithmic Bias — 1× in this paper · explained in 1 episode
• Cooperation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Core — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Embeddings — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Fidelity — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Foundation Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Foundation Models — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes
• Generalization — 1× in this paper · explained in 13 episodes
• Hyperactive Agency Detection Device — 1× in this paper
• Large Language Model (LLM) — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Large Language Models (LLMs) — 1× in this paper · explained in 6 episodes
• Latent Representation — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Latent Representations — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Multi-Agent Framework — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Ontology — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• Reasoning Traces — 1× in this paper · explained in 3 episodes
• Verification — 1× in this paper · explained in 2 episodes
• World Model — 1× in this paper · explained in 7 episodes

Sources

• Role-Play with Large Language Models
• Could a Large Language Model be Conscious?
• Exploring Consciousness in LLMs: A Systematic Survey of Theories, Implementations, and Frontier Risks
• Subjective Experience in AI Systems: What Do AI Researchers and the Public Believe?
• OMEGA: Can LLMs Reason Outside the Box in Math? Evaluating Exploratory, Compositional, and Transformative Generalization
• The Danger of Overthinking: Examining the Reasoning-Action Dilemma in Agentic Tasks
• Semantic Deception: When Reasoning Models Can't Compute an Addition
• Deciphering the Factors Influencing the Efficacy of Chain-of-Thought: Probability, Memorization, and Noisy Reasoning
• Meaning without reference in large language models
• Emergence of Phonemic, Syntactic, and Semantic Representations in Artificial Neural Networks
• Emergent World Representations: Exploring a Sequence Model Trained on a Synthetic Task
• Large Language Models as Superpositions of Cultural Perspectives
• Position: Stop Anthropomorphizing Intermediate Tokens as Reasoning/Thinking Traces!
• Ethical and social risks of harm from Language Models
• ScholarPeer: A Context-Aware Multi-Agent Framework for Automated Peer Review
• Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions
• ELEPHANT: Measuring and understanding social sycophancy in LLMs
• Disambiguating Anthropomorphism and Anthropomimesis in Human-Robot Interaction
• The Ethics of Advanced AI Assistants
• Manipulation and the AI Act: Large Language Model Chatbots and the Danger of Mirrors

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