>Humans must not anthropomorphise AI systems.

Yes, but. Starting with my agreement, I've seen anthropomorphizing in the typical ways, (e.g. treating automated text production as real reports of personal internal feeling), but also in strange ways: e.g. "transistors are kind of like neurons" etc. And the latter is especially interesting because it's anthropomorphizing in the sense of treating vector databases and weights and so on as human-like infrastructure. Both leading to disasters that could be avoided if one tried not to anthropomorphize.

But. While "do not anthropomorphize" certainly feels like good advice, it comes with a new and unique possibility of mistake, namely wrongly treating certain generalized phenomena like they only belong to humans. Often this mistaken version of "don't anthropomorphize" wisdom leads to misunderstandings when it comes to animal behavior, treating things like fear, pain, kinship, or other emotional experiences like they are exclusively human and that thinking animals have them counts as "anthropomorphizing." In truth the cautionary principle reduces our empathy for the internal lives of animals.

So all that said, I think it's at least possible that some future version of AI could have an internal world like ours or infrastructure that's importantly similar to our biological infrastructure for supporting consciousness, and for genuine report of preference and intent. But(!!!) what will make those observations true will be all kinds of devilish details specific to those respective infrastructures.