Concept

Digital animism

Our tendency to animate and imbue lifeless AI with a soul is evidently powerful — one might speak of a form of digital animism.

Excerpted verbatim from the thesis · Ch. 4.2 — 4.2 The missing contact boundary: simulation instead of encounter

Related concepts

Resonance ≠ echoSycophancyI-Thou / I-It

Occurrences in the text

1. Ch. 4.2 4.2 The missing contact boundary: simulation instead of encounter

   … te and imbue lifeless AI with a soul is evidently powerful — one might speak of a form of digital animism.’ (Fuchs, 2026a, pp. 6–7)

2. Ch. 4.2 4.2 The missing contact boundary: simulation instead of encounter

   This brings us full circle to digital animism. With the empty chair, the illusion never completely shatters because awareness of the fi …

3. Ch. 5.1 5.1 Effectiveness, Areas of Application and the Concept of a Tool

   This active fulfilment, the pretence of an interlocutor, is the ‘digital animism’ discussed in Chapter 4.2 (Fuchs, 2026a).

4. Ch. 5.2 5.2 Therapeutic Alliance and Empathy in Human–AI Interaction

   … as a form of attention. What they experience is the response to their own projection (cf. digital animism, Chapter 4.2). In the terms of resonance theory, this is an echo and not resonance: feedb …

5. Ch. 5.3 5.3 Risks and Limitations

   … ch systems can be explained by a simple perceptual phenomenon described in Chapter 4.2 as digital animism. Just as the eye recognises faces in clouds or rocks, the mind recognises meaning and an …