---
title: "Anthropomorphic Capture"
description: "Antikythera's label rather than Bratton's own: After Alignment never says \"capture,\" but describes it repeatedly."
type: "glossary-term"
canonical_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/terms/anthropomorphic-capture"
md_url: "https://antikythera.wiki/md/terms/anthropomorphic-capture"
last_updated: "2026-09-06"
site: "Antikythera Wiki"
---

# Anthropomorphic Capture

> A working definition written for this wiki from the reading notes; not Antikythera's own wording. From Antikythera Wiki (https://antikythera.wiki/terms/anthropomorphic-capture), an independent guide to Antikythera's published work.

Antikythera's label rather than Bratton's own: After Alignment never says "capture," but describes it repeatedly. AI discourse gets pulled into human-scale vocabulary (thinking, wanting, deceiving, sentience) so that what the system actually does goes unexamined. Bratton roots the pull in an evolved reflex to read intention into any fluent conversant; his case is the Blake Lemoine episode, which he and Agüera y Arcas had analysed in The Model Is the Message as "motivated anthropomorphic projection" amplified by a model that was in fact modeling Lemoine's mind. Capture is thus the interaction-level mechanism of Reflectionism, and why Human-AI Interaction Design must manage anthropomorphization where HCI managed skeuomorphism. Denialists ("just statistics") and the Alignment camp that wants AI glued to human norms measure the machine against the same template. Agentworld pulls the other way: there the humanoid mask is a scale-expedient interface that "may not last," not a discursive error.

## Appears in

- [Agentworld (Research Brief)](https://antikythera.wiki/work/book/agentworld-brief) (2026-06-25)
- [Mutual Prediction in Human-AI Coevolution](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/coginfra/mutual-prediction-in-human-ai-coevolution) (2025-05-10)
- [After Alignment](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/afteralignment) (2025-05-10)
- [Antikythera](https://antikythera.wiki/work/journal/research) (2025-05-10)
- [The Model Is The Message](https://antikythera.wiki/work/media/noema-the-model-is-the-message) (2022-07-12)

_Glossary generated 2026-09-06._