Abstract ’Language matters. How we describe “AI” technology influences how it is perceived, deployed, and trusted. Extravagant and persuasive language incites hype. It is the responsibility of journalists, companies, and scholars to characterize technology in ways that inform and empower their readers by using appropriate terminology and avoiding inflated claims. ’One type of inflated claim comes from using anthropomorphizing language to describe system functionality. Anthropomorphization is the attribution of human capabilities and characteristics to an inanimate system. In this paper, we present a linguistic analysis of anthropomorphizing language in 29 texts (a total of 1,368 sentences) from academic articles, online news articles, and company blog posts. ‘We construct a taxonomy of eight categories of anthropomorphization: Cognizer, Products of cognition, Emotion, Communication, Agent, Human role analogy, Names and pronouns, and Biological metaphors. Following this taxonomy we present concrete strategies for how to de-anthropomorphize the language we use to describe “AI” based on a functionality-first principle.’

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‘We generally argued that writers describing probabilistic automation systems should aim to apply a functionality-first principle, where the goal is to explain the system in terms of what we can use it to achieve rather than what “capabilities” we posit it has.’