Academic research is increasingly anthropomorphising technology – a trend that could mislead the public about how powerful artificial intelligence and other cutting-edge developments really are.
Myra Cheng and her colleagues at Stanford University, California, analysed the content of more than 655,000 academic publications released between May 2007 and September 2023, along with the headlines of approximately 14,000 news articles citing some of those papers. They rated the extent to which each text used human pronouns such as “he” and “she” rather than “it”, as well…
