We investigate the prevalence of anthropomorphic language in the reporting of AI technology, focussed on NLP and LLMs. We undertake a corpus annotation focussing on one year of ACL long-paper abstracts and news articles from the same period. We find that 74% of ACL abstracts and 88% of news articles contain some form of anthropomorphic description of AI technology. Further, we train a regression classifier based on BERT, demonstrating that we can automatically label abstracts for their degree of anthropomorphism based on our corpus. We conclude by applying this labelling process to abstracts available in the entire history of the ACL Anthology and reporting on diachronic and inter-venue findings, showing that the degree of anthropomorphism is increasing at all examined venues over time.

Anthropomorphism is a literary device where human-like characteristics are used to refer to non-human entities. However, the use of anthropomorphism in the scientific description and public communication of large language models could lead to misunderstanding amongst scientists and lay-people regarding the technical capabilities and limitations of these models. In this study, we present an analysis of anthropomorphised language commonly used to describe LLMs, showing that the presence of terms such as ‘learn’, ‘achieve’, ‘predict’ and ‘can’ are typically correlated with human labels of anthropomorphism. We also perform experiments to develop a classification system for anthropomorphic descriptions of LLMs in scientific writing at the sentence level. We find that whilst a supervised Roberta-based system identifies anthropomorphisms with F1-score of 0.564, state-of-the-art LLM-based approaches regularly overfit to the task.