Dimitrios Theodossopoulos (University of Kent) "From Recognition to Misrecognition: Indigeneity, the AI Dialectic and the Anthropomorphic Temptation"

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Abstract: What happens when a social anthropologist conducts a sustained dialectical exchange with an AI system on a topic he knows intimately through decades of ethnographic fieldwork? This paper presents an experiment in which I repeatedly challenge my AI interlocutor, Mirror-Mirror, to explain and justify its representations of Emberá indigeneity in Panama. Some of its responses proved unexpectedly sophisticated, frequently resembling contemporary anthropological reasoning, rather than reproducing static or essentialised representations of indigenous peoples (as I initially expected). Instead of accepting these responses at face value, I repeatedly interrupted the ‘machine’ by demanding precise scholarly attribution, conceptual genealogy, and ethnographic specificity. As the dialectic unfolded, what initially appeared as the machine’s capacity for providing original insights, increasingly dissolved into recombinations of existing anthropological knowledge. Thus, the experiment ultimately revealed less about artificial intelligence than about anthropology itself. I argue that the principal analytical challenge is not whether AI can think—machines don’t think—but why human interlocutors so readily recognise understanding, judgement, and originality in patterned computational responsiveness. The chapter traces a movement from recognition to misrecognition, showing how sustained dialectical engagement with machine intelligence gradually exposes a series of anthropomorphic traps embedded within our anthropological interpretive habits. Rather than treating AI as an autonomous thinking subject, I suggest that the challenge posed by AI offers anthropology a uniquely productive opportunity to examine its own practices of interpretation and conditions of scholarly recognition, precisely because the machine mirrors back to us the disciplinary habits through which anthropological knowledge is produced and recognised. Dimitrios Theodossopoulos is Emeritus Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Kent