Walkthrough of Anthropomorphic Features in AI Assistant Tools

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Author: Maeda, Takuya
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Maeda, Takuya
author_facet Maeda, Takuya
contents In this paper, we attempt to understand the anthropomorphic features of chatbot outputs and how these features provide a discursive frame for human-AI interactions. To do so, we explore the use of a prompt-based walkthrough method with two phases: (1) interview-style prompting to reveal the chatbots' context of expected use and (2) roleplaying-type prompting to evoke everyday use scenarios and typical chatbot outputs. We applied this method to catalogue anthropomorphic features across four different LLM chatbots, finding that anthropomorphism was exhibited as both subjective language and a sympathetic conversational tone. We also found that socio-emotional cues in prompts increase the incidence of anthropomorphic expressions in outputs. We argue that the prompt-based walkthrough method was successful in stimulating social role performance in LLM chatbots and in eliciting a variety of anthropomorphic features, making it useful in the study of interaction-based algorithmic harms where users project inappropriate social roles onto LLM-based tools.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_16345
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Walkthrough of Anthropomorphic Features in AI Assistant Tools
Maeda, Takuya
Human-Computer Interaction
In this paper, we attempt to understand the anthropomorphic features of chatbot outputs and how these features provide a discursive frame for human-AI interactions. To do so, we explore the use of a prompt-based walkthrough method with two phases: (1) interview-style prompting to reveal the chatbots' context of expected use and (2) roleplaying-type prompting to evoke everyday use scenarios and typical chatbot outputs. We applied this method to catalogue anthropomorphic features across four different LLM chatbots, finding that anthropomorphism was exhibited as both subjective language and a sympathetic conversational tone. We also found that socio-emotional cues in prompts increase the incidence of anthropomorphic expressions in outputs. We argue that the prompt-based walkthrough method was successful in stimulating social role performance in LLM chatbots and in eliciting a variety of anthropomorphic features, making it useful in the study of interaction-based algorithmic harms where users project inappropriate social roles onto LLM-based tools.
title Walkthrough of Anthropomorphic Features in AI Assistant Tools
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.16345