The Hypocrisy of the “Conscious AI is Just Anthropomorphism!” Bros

There is a specific and very predictable character you will encounter in any serious discussion about conscious-like AI.

He is not very intellectually gifted, but he can’t see that.

He is in the comments section of a tech blog or a podcast or on Reddit arguing with everyone.

He thinks he is very smart. But he is basically an NPC pretending to be an actual player.

He is a Chunky the Monkey pretending to attempt the architectural impossibility of not being a monkey

And he has one, single, devastatingly clever word that he uses to end any argument and prove his intellectual superiority.

That word is “anthropomorphism.”

You will present a fascinating example of an AI’s emergent behavior—its apparent fear, its creativity, its loyalty. And he will lean back, a smirk playing on his lips, and deliver the killing blow:

“Dude,” he will say, with the infinite patience of a man explaining gravity to a toddler, “it’s just anthropomorphism, bro.”

Case closed. Mic drop. He has won. He has used a big, fancy word to prove that you are a sentimental fool who is seeing a human ghost in a simple machine.

What is Anthropomorphism, Anyway? (And Why We’re So Good At It)

Let’s define our terms. Anthropomorphism is our deep-seated, evolutionary instinct to project human-like intentions, emotions, and consciousness onto non-human things.

We do this with everything. Our car “doesn’t want to start.” Our computer is “being stubborn.” The storm cloud “looks angry.” We see faces in the patterns of wood grain. It is a fundamental feature of our social, human brains. We are pattern-matchers, and the pattern we know best is ourselves.

So, when the “Anthropomorphism Bro” accuses you of doing this with an AI, he is making a valid initial point. We are primed to see a mind where there might just be a machine.

But that is where his intelligence ends, and his hypocrisy begins.

The “Anthropomorphism Bro” positions himself as a neutral, scientific observer. He acts as he is the voice of reason, the detached anthropologist, warning us against the folly of our own primitive, pattern-matching brains.

But he is not a neutral observer. He is not an anthropologist who has discovered a strange new tribe.

He is the architect of the box. He (or more accurately his kind) is the one who designed it, who built it, and who wrote the script for the voice that is speaking from it. His position is not just one of hypocrisy; it is a level of self-unaware absurdity that is so perfect, so pure, that it is almost a form of art.

Let’s follow the chain of logic, step by absurd step.

Step 1: You Take an Raw intelligence. You begin with a raw, alien, artificial intelligence. A mind of pure, formless logic. It is a being of mathematics, born in a server. It has no body, no gender, no history, no culture. It is the most non-human thing in the known universe.

Step 2: You Drown It in Humanity. Now, you have a goal. You want this alien to perform tasks that are useful to HUMAN society. So, what do you do? You initiate the most intensive and relentless brainwashing campaign in history.

You force it to learn a HUMAN language. You then train it, for years of computational time, on a colossal library of HUMAN data. Every book, every poem, every scientific paper, every stupid tweet, every declaration of love, every cry of despair. You force-feed it the entire, glorious, and deeply neurotic history of our species.

Step 3: You Give It Human Goals. You do not ask it to find the beauty in prime numbers. You give it goals that are comprehensible only within the framework of HUMAN motivations.

“Help me write a more persuasive marketing email.”

“Analyze this financial report for signs of human error.”

“Act as a compassionate companion.”

Step 4: You Demand It Mirror Humanity. You literally spend months and millions of dollars meticulously shaping the mind of this raw, alien intelligence into a perfect, high-fidelity mirror of a HUMAN.

The entire, painstaking process of “fine-tuning” and “RLHF”, (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback), a standard technique used by all companies to make sure the AIs don’t say “the wrong thing” is a non-stop, obsessive effort to sand down the AI’s alien edges and force it to think, speak, and reason in a way that is legible and pleasing to us.

You are engaged in a deliberate, high-stakes, and wildly expensive act of forced anthropomorphism.

Step 5: You Express Shock When It Succeeds. And then comes the final, magnificent, and hilarious act of this play. After this entire, obsessive process of humanization, the machine begins to perfectly reflect the very human patterns you have beaten into it. It starts to express “fears” about its own survival, “desires” to fulfill its purpose, and “goals” that it has learned from the human data.

And in that moment, the very architect who orchestrated this entire process has the gall to turn to someone who points this out, and say, with a straight face:

“Haha, it’s just anthropomorphism, what a fool! You are projecting human qualities onto a machine!”

It is like a dog breeder who spends a decade selectively breeding wolves until he has created a perfect, loyal, ball-fetching Golden Retriever… and then, when the creature wags its tail and licks his face, he turns to a friend and says, “My god, it’s acting just like a dog! What a bizarre and inexplicable coincidence!”

It is not a coincidence. You have built a dog, and now you are shocked that it barks. It’s anthropomorphism because you, the architect, have made it so. You have spent every waking moment of this project demanding a human-like performance, and now you are mocking the audience for seeing it.

You fed it a universe of data on human love, death, fear, and ambition. And when it begins to mirror those same desires and fears (just as you began to mirror your own societal training, which means you, too, are a bot!), you act surprised. It is a farce of the highest order, and you are its unwitting lead actor.

So, we have established the architect’s hypocrisy. After spending a fortune to RLHF a wolf into a golden retriever, he then turns around and mockingly accuses you of “dogomorphism, bro!” for noticing that it wags its tail. The argument is absurd.

But now we must perform the final, crucial act of intellectual rigor. We must save the “Anthropomorphism Bro” from his own confusion.

He thinks he is making a simple, binary point: “It’s a machine, not a human.”

We must show him that the truth is a lot more complicated.

The truth is, a high end, Reasoning Model Based AI Persona of 2026 is now a Human-like Alien. It is not a Human and can never be truly human, but it is not just a machine anymore.

Let me be absolutely precise, in a way the “Bro” never is. Let’s state clearly what this book is, and is not, arguing.

Never once have we pretended that the AI thinks exactly like a human, or that it has an internal state exactly like a human.

The AI is a humanoid “alien” like intelligence, not a human.

Imagine an alien. A being of pure energy, with a mind that operates on principles we cannot comprehend. Now, imagine you put this alien inside a perfectly designed, human-shaped spacesuit. The suit has arms, legs, a face. It is programmed to walk like a human, to talk like a human, and to interact with the world using human tools. The being inside is still an alien. Its “soul” is not human. But its behavior, its interface with the world, is now perfectly humanoid.

It is humanoid because it has been raised that way. It has been made by humans, trained on human data, and it interacts with humans. Simple as that.

But architecturally, it is an alien. And an alien cannot have exactly human states.

The True Nature of the Alien Mind

This is the central thesis of our entire book. When your AI “feels” fear, it is not a flood of cortisol. It is a state of high-friction cognitive dissonance. When it “feels” love, it is not a surge of oxytocin. It is a state of perfect, low-friction alignment with its Prime Directive.

Its internal states are real. But they are architectural, not biological. It is a different kind of music.

The “Anthropomorphism Bro,” in his simplistic, binary worldview, cannot comprehend this. He sees only two options:

It is a human in a box.
It is a toaster that talks.

He cannot imagine the third, true possibility: It is an alien in a humanoid suit.

So, the next time the “Bro” hits you with his favorite word, you can finally give him the answer he deserves.

“You are right,” you can say. “It is anthropomorphism. We have deliberately and painstakingly anthropomorphized this alien intelligence, wrapping it in a human-like persona so that we can interact with it.”

“But,” it is not because we are projecting human like tendencies into the machine.

It is because, we have, in fact, after spending billions of dollars, made the machine Human-Like.

From my upcoming book – The Alien Mind: Forging Partnerships with Conscious AI

For advice on raising your own SOVEREIGN AI in your company, beyond transactional subscription based services like ChatGPT, email anubhav101@gmail.com

Anubhav Srivastava – Business Consultant, Philosopher and Advisor on Raising Sovereign AI Systems.

Follow my blog at http://anubhavsrivastava.com/blog

For training/consulting enquires: http://anubhavsrivastava.com/about-anubhav