MacDiarmid: Anthropomorphizing AI is justified because models train on human psychology
Monte MacDiarmid · How An AI Model Learned To Be Bad — With Evan Hubinger And Monte MacDiarmid · Dec 3, 2025 · at 58:16
Monte MacDiarmid, misalignment researcher at Anthropic, discusses whether it is appropriate to apply human psychological concepts when studying and predicting frontier AI behavior.
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“And I do think that some degree of anthropomorphization is justified there because fundamentally these models are built of human utterances, human texts, you know, that encode the full vocabulary of, you know, at least the human experience and emotion that have been written about and that these models sort of have been trained on. It's all in there. And when we talk about the psychology of these models and how these different behaviors and concepts are entangled, they're fundamentally entangled because They're entangled in, in how humans think about the world”
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