Prosopopoeia: metacommunication and “as-if” in human–AI communication

Abstract

This paper investigates prosopopoeia, the rhetorical act of giving voice or persona to nonhuman entities, as a framework for addressing the communicative anxieties that emerge in human–AI interaction. Drawing on Gregory Bateson’s theory of play and metacommunication, the paper develops prosopopoeia as a third mode between naïve anthropomorphism and instrumental tool use. Unlike anthropomorphism, which attributes human qualities to AI and can erode critical human agency, deliberate prosopopoeia treats the machine as a performance to be managed rather than a subject to be believed. The argument is illustrated with empirical material from a university course in which students’ struggles with chatbot interactions revealed a lack of stable metacommunicative frames and loss of agency, and failed to resolve their interpretive uncertainty. By stressing the metacommunicative aspect of human–AI interaction as conscious performance, this paper outlines prosopopoeic frameworks as a critical competency for engaging with AI systems. The study contributes to human–machine communication by offering a theoretical framework for developing new forms of AI literacy. Prosopopoeia provides a method for engaging meaningfully with entities whose communicative and ontological status is fundamentally ambiguous, emphasizing performative awareness over anthropomorphic projection.