Person A: If we keep our food in this frozen ice igloo then Nubiroakox, the God of Pestilence will spare us and not ruin our food.
Person B: It's actually not Nubiroakox, it's just that the conditions for bacteria to grow depend on temper...
You: If attributing this behavior to magic a) gives practical insight into it's behavior that b) also happens to result in the behavior you would expect, why not do it?
It's more akin to giving your Roomba a name, and describing it's behavior in terms of "it likes to eat goldfish, but not string because it gets tangled up".
That's still anthropomorphizing, but it's not ascribing anything magical or outright wrong to it.
It can be a useful and cute fiction, as your Roomba example, but it leads to bad decision making (“I’ll put more goldfish on the floor to make the Roomba happy”).
I guess it all comes down to how important accuracy is to you in a particular context. I anthropomorphize my dishwasher (it HATES wine glasses), but I don’t make professional judgments about dishwashers.
We do that with a lot of things every day and a perfectly capable of drawing the lines when things come down to it.
On a more philosophical note. If we some day end up creating AGI, having anthropomorphized it will actually be to our benefit.
So you are technically correct but this is not about being technically correct.
The only controversy is whether and anthromorph is an isomorph of an accurate model of ChatGPT. I doubt that it is, yet is close enough to fool a lot of people, then surprise them at random.
Because both of those steps are really unreliable. The insight we receive is only as useful as the behavior it corroborates, and that behavior is only as notable as the patterns it follows. AI... doesn't really behave consistently. Assuming that it will follow the behavior you expect ignores the actual motive of the model, which is to fill-in the blank after whatever you typed.
Personally, I think it's harmful because anthropomorphic AI is a poor abstraction for text-completion models. That being said, most people don't ever seem to know the difference.
This is a classic example from philosophy of mind. It doesn't completely harmonize with the question you're asking, but it concisely summarizes two opposing views.
What's my view? That we do it all the time as a matter of course. "Why not do it?" isn't the question. The question is how much weight we should give to the result, and whether we should take care to question the results and try something else, too.
Something closer to the term "GPGPU" would have at least given more of a sense of reality. There is nothing intelligent about a GPU crunching billions of numbers in a massively parallel way and converting those numbers into something that happens to interface convincingly with the human sensory systems. It's just an algorithm with so much data that one can't comprehend thinking about the sheer size of it, so naturally it must be thought of as "intelligent."