Substantive and Emotional: The Anthropomorphic Evolution of Generative AITaking GPT-4o as an Example

Abstract

Under the background of the rapid development of artificial intelligence technology, "personal publishing" represented by blog in the past has transformed into "human-computer co-creation", showing a new human-computer interaction relationship, and generative artificial intelligence has become the "collaborator" of human content creation. The flagship multimodal large language model "anthropomorphism" represented by GPT-4o is evolving from "linguistic anthropomorphism" to "emotional anthropomorphism". Based on the anthropomorphic theory, this paper aims to reveal that GPT-4o, while demonstrating its linguistic intelligence in the human-machine co-created dialogue, simulates human emotional response, showing empathy and "resonance", that is, the "anthropomorphic" process at the two levels of "words have things" and "words have feelings". It also reflects on the potential ethical challenges of the anthropomorphic evolution of generative AI to future human society.