Surely there's a better way to say that, and a more charitable reading of my comment. As a researcher in the field, I think it's safe to say I understand the models, and maybe I am overly sensitive at people jumping to wrong conclusions because I'm so tired of it.
The issue isn't the communication aspect of the analogy, it's the reasoning aspect. For example, people who understand these things say "these work like people" (a useful analogy) and then people who don't understand them say "well if they work like people then they should be legislated like people" (not useful reasoning). That's the danger.
You can see lay people in this very thread taking the analogies literally and extrapolating based on literal interpretations of model-brain analogies.
Eg, Someone will naively state that something is or isn’t copyright infringement “because the tool learns like humans do”… which again, is not a question that a court would ask about the tool and since copyright is a legal invention it is kind of pointless to drift off into philosophical oblivion…
It’s not anthropomorphizing it’s a description and an analogy.
Neural networks work similar to a brain, and it’s easier to describe them that way because, again, they were modelled that way.
It’s not a perfect analogy, but your offence would indicate you have a lack of understanding in communication, neural nets, or you’re trying to blow things out of proportion for some reason.