The Parasocial Power of AI (www.christiancentury.org)

This essay explores the surprising ease with which humans grant personhood to objects and AI, using small anecdotes (a clementine with a drawn face, a polite Google device) to probe why a machine or thing can feel “like someone.” Drawing on Alan Turing’s original imitation game and neuroscientist Michael Graziano’s distinction between I‑consciousness (information processing) and m‑consciousness (the model-building, empathic sense of “who” someone is), the piece argues that personhood is as much a social, perceptual phenomenon as a technical one. Psychologists call the one‑sided emotional bonds we form with media and devices parasociality; evolutionarily, fast, rough person‑models helped humans survive and now make us quick to anthropomorphize. For the AI/ML community this matters technically and ethically. It reframes intelligence as communal participation (not just internal capability), suggesting that Turing‑style tests capture relational effects as much as raw cognition. Practical implications include how interfaces, language models, and embodied agents should be designed (transparency, guardrails against manipulative anthropomorphism), how we evaluate systems (metrics for social trust and misattribution), and how policy must address the moral hazards of misplaced empathy — treating devices as persons while excluding vulnerable humans. The essay urges researchers and designers to recognize these parasocial reflexes and to shape AI that fosters healthy social integration rather than exploiting our instinct to see minds where none exist.