anthropomorphize

present singular third person anthropomorphizes · participle present anthropomorphizing · participle past anthropomorphized · past anthropomorphized · alternative anthropomorphise

1. transitiveTo endow with human qualities.
2. transitiveTo ascribe human characteristics and behaviors to nonhuman entities.

   But for some animal-obsessive ceramists, anthropomorphizing as a sculptural approach is a zany (and speedy) joy.

   2021 August 19, Nancy Hass, “The Ceramists Crafting Miniature Menageries”, in The New York Times Style Magazine

   4 more examples

   Bonnie Lucas further anthropomorphizes the flower in her watercolors, combining it surreally with the human female figure[…]

   1988 January 15, Kathryn Hixson, “On Exhibit: a gallery full of flowers”, in Chicago Reader

   A month away from twenty-six and there you are, in the middle of a Monday afternoon, genuinely engaged in the madcap antics of a slope-headed, claymated man and his anthropomorphized horse.

   1998, Paul McComas, Twenty Questions: A Collection of Short and Very Short Stories, Fithian Press, →ISBN, page 33

   It has been two months since I last checked my feed, during which time Facebook has sent me notifications I didn't sign up for, informing me every time someone posts, and invited me to attend locally organised focus groups. […] Of course, I am anthropomorphising a machine; no one is in charge of all this.

   2018 June 15, Emma Brockes, “No, Facebook, I won’t be back. I’ve seen the dangers of habitual sharing”, in The Guardian

   I do think that this perspective offers a useful corrective to the tendency to anthropomorphize large-language models, but there is another aspect to the compression analogy that is worth considering.

   2023 February 9, Ted Chiang, “ChatGPT Is a Blurry JPEG of the Web”, in The New Yorker