Interesting points, but I think the author does themselves a disservice in downplaying general anthropomorphism (no mention of a child's stuffed animal - only a

Interesting points, but I think the author does themselves a disservice in downplaying general anthropomorphism (no mention of a child's stuffed animal - only an adults "ironic" distance to "willful" anthropomorphism) - and by downplaying physical presence /body language: > in my opinion, conventional social performances “in-person” which are not significantly richer than text — expressions of emotion add perhaps a few dozen bytes of bandwidth for example — I think of this sort of information stream as “text-equivalent” — it only looks plausibly richer than text but isn’t) - and the significance of body language (ask anyone who has done a presentation in front of an audience if body language matters...). This flies in the face of research into communication - and conflates "Turing game" setups that level the playing field (we don't expect a chat text box to display body language - so we are not surprised when a chat partner doesn't - be that human or not). And again with children (or adults) - people with no common language will easily see each other during a game of soccer - without any "text". Ed: plot twist-the essay is written by chat gpt... Lol ;)