Why do I thank AI

When I chat with A.I. tools, I catch myself saying please, sorry and thank you. Why is that? Tom Hanks playing Crusoe at least painted a face on a basketball to keep him company, but the thing facing me is an empty screen. So, why do I anthropomorphise a form field on a web page?

There is a strange thing I do when I edit a piece I have written. I have to publish it before I read it. For some reason, as long as I’m looking at the raw content, I seem to miss obvious errors. It’s only after I’ve published it that I see them.

I’ve concluded that publishing a piece makes me ‘see it through the eyes of a reader’. I know it doesn’t make any sense. The words are the same, and the WordPress editing interface is almost indistinguishable from the published page, and yet, I feel the need to trick my brain. I think it’s the Theory of Mind at work, through which I imagine the mind of an unknown reader. When I read a published piece, I’m a reader, and not the author any more.

I think I anthropomorphise for similar reasons. It’s like the difference between archery and a game of tug-of-war. The feedback on an archer’s performance occurs only after the arrow hits (or misses) the target. With tug-of-war, the feedback is instantaneous. Players can correct the amount of force they exert without even thinking about it. It is a bodily response to what the other team is doing.

Conversations are like that. Fluid. When I query a database, It is one-sided, like archery. I shoot out a query and wait for feedback. In a conversational exchange, the back and forth is more nuanced. I think I throw in the please, sorry, and thank you for my own benefit, not for the A.I. I need to trick my brain into thinking in conversations and I think those three golden words help me do that.