Anthropomorphising AI, or Misunderstanding Ourselves? Reflection on dialogue, meaning, and where human qualities really reside

I recently read a Substack post titled “Who are ‘we’ really?” by Rupert Wegerif, Professor of Education at the University of Cambridge, and shared it with my friend David Creelman. David drew my attention to a particular line, which prompted me to reflect on it more deeply.

Rupert writes:

People accuse me of anthropomorphising the technology, of projecting human qualities onto what is really just a sophisticated tool. But I think this objection rests on a misunderstanding—not so much of AI, as of ourselves.

What I think Rupert is pointing to is a deeper assumption we often make about what it means to be human. When people worry about anthropomorphising AI, they usually assume that qualities such as understanding, meaning, or thinking live inside individuals as fixed properties. From that perspective, engaging with a technology in conversational terms appears to be a category error, as if we were mistakenly treating a tool as a person.

But there is another way of seeing ourselves. Much of what we call human does not reside neatly within us as individuals. Meaning, understanding, memory, and learning often emerge between us, through language, interaction, and shared attention. Conversation is not something one person does alone. It is something that happens in relationship.

Seen this way, engaging with AI conversationally is not necessarily about projecting humanity onto a machine. It may be about recognising that human thinking has always been shaped by tools, symbols, writing, and shared practices. Dialogue has never been purely internal. It has always been mediated by the ways we think together.

So the question shifts. It is not whether AI is human, but what kind of conversational space is being created, and how that space shapes our thinking and sense-making. In that light, Rupert’s comment feels less like a claim about AI itself and more like an invitation to rethink what we mean by being human in the first place.