People seem all too ready to anthropomorphize LLMs and AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Some humans even admit to ‘relationships’ with one or more of the various examples of machine intelligence. To illustrate how flawed this instinct could be, a Microsoft AI researcher built a tiny neural network inside Age of Empires II using goats, grass, and bridges. Adrian de Wynter shared his work in a paper dubbed If LLMs have human-like attributes, then so does Age of Empires II. The Microsoft researcher, based at the University of York, also talked to 404 Media recently about how he likes to turn absurdism up to 11 to make a point.
In the research paper, De Wynter doesn’t make the argument that LLMs do or do not actually have generalized anthropomorphic attributes. Instead, he illustrates that the AoEII goats can also power the kinds of models that lay behind today's most popular chatbots. That hammers home the argument that “in no case is a machine’s activity to be interpreted in terms of higher cognitive processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of cognitive evolution and development.”
