December 7, 2025
Promposal meets spreadsheets
Bag of words, have mercy on us
He called AI a “bag of words” — the internet yelled, memed, and brought receipts
TLDR: A psychologist says we should stop treating AI like people and call it a “bag of words” instead. Commenters clapped back that the metaphor is misleading, revived century-old debates, and split between skeptics and “it’ll be like the iPhone” optimists—proof the AI identity crisis is far from over.
Psychologist Adam Mastroianni says stop treating chatbots like people and start seeing them as a “bag of words.” Cue the comment section going full stadium. The biggest mood: “bad metaphor, bro.” Users like viccis and palata pounced, noting “bag of words” is already a real term and this new metaphor doesn’t actually help people understand how “word-predictor” AI works. Others channeled legendary computer scientist Dijkstra, cheering the anti-anthropomorphizing stance while dunking on anyone who talks about AIs “thinking.”
Then the history nerds kicked the door in. Kim_Bruning invoked Lady Lovelace and Alan Turing, basically yelling, “we’ve had this fight since the 1800s!” The thread turned into a throwback party with references to Game of Life and the halting problem, i.e., long-running proof that simple rules can look weirdly alive. Meanwhile, optimists like Herring dropped the iPhone 1 analogy and linked to METR to argue early AI is clumsy now but will level up fast.
Humor? Oh, plenty. The “Claude will you go to prom with me?” line became a meme factory: corsage pics, dad-joke puns about “token rings,” and riffs on AI telling you to put glue on pizza. One practical zinger asked: if we only care about humans performing, does anyone want to watch me programming?
Key Points
- •The author argues that people misinterpret AI by anthropomorphizing it, applying human psychology to machine outputs.
- •He provides examples of human pattern-seeking and agency attribution to show why AI is often treated as a person.
- •He notes LLM inconsistencies: inventing citations, failing simple letter counts, and giving nonsensical advice, while excelling at complex tasks.
- •He proposes a new metaphor for AI: treat it as a “bag of words,” emphasizing pattern generation from text over human-like intention.
- •He contends that adopting this metaphor will set more accurate expectations and reduce confusion about AI behavior.