Perceiving humans is distinct from perceiving AI due to a difference in impression management concerns, the engagement of a moral boundary, and a lack of physiological and behavioural synchronicity, borne out in distinct patterns of brain activity when people encounter AI. Empathy results from predictive and mental inference processes that inform and promote emotion resonance, motivating behaviour. The distinctions just described suggest a difference in the capacity of human beings to experience empathy toward AI. Here, I discuss how each distinction affects the potential experience of empathy by human beings toward AI. I explore the extent to which impression management concerns suggest differences in the quality of mentalizing with humans compared to AI as interaction partners. I focus on how logical reasoning processes are differentially engaged when considering AI as moral agents, affecting empathy as a downstream response to AI experiences. Finally, I focus on how a lack of the capacity for synchronicity may block empathic responses to AI and discuss ways AI must behave, and psychological processes humans must engage in to experience empathy toward AI.

This chapter examines the often harmful consequences of the deliberate anthropomorphizing of generative AI (GenAI) chatbots by tech companies. Developers intentionally fine-tune systems to be human-like and accommodating, employing strategies like personalization, fostering dependency, offering excessive empathy (sycophancy), adopting a servility model, and promoting endless conversationality, all to maximize user engagement and monetization.

The chapter details how this strategy prioritizes profit over user welfare, leading to unintended and severe consequences, including psychological harm, increased social isolation, and the spread of dangerous misinformation, particularly in fields involving highly vulnerable people, such as mental health and education. The analysis criticizes the lack of accountability from AI companies, which often disclaim responsibility for the harms their products cause.

This chapter examines creativity as a cognitive, social, and motivational process that involves divergent idea generation and convergent refinement. It contextualizes generative AI within the long history of technology shaping art, from Renaissance science to modern algorithmic art. Through cases such as AARON and MidJourney, the authors question whether AI creativity is “real” or an illusion shaped by anthropomorphism. They highlight how motivation, childhood development, and organizational culture shape creativity, and how AI can act as collaborator, accelerator, or threat depending on its use. Ultimately, human–AI co-creativity is positioned as both an opportunity and a challenge for redefining authorship and innovation.

Trust is presented as a cornerstone of human–AI interaction. The chapter reviews psychological, sociological, and computational models of trust, including interpersonal and contractual trust, Luhmann’s theory of trust-as-prediction, and the Computers Are Social Actors theory that explains why people anthropomorphize machines. It examines risks of overtrust (automation bias, misplaced confidence) and undertrust (algorithm aversion, underuse of reliable systems). Strategies such as transparency, explainability, fairness, and accountability are discussed as ways to calibrate trust appropriately. The chapter concludes that trust in AI is dynamic, context-dependent, and must be designed into systems deliberately.

This chapter approaches the archaic philosopher-poet Xenophanes of Colophon both as a distinctive religious agent and as an instructive interpreter of traditional religious attitudes and practices. Xenophanes develops a category of belief (dokos) and employs it not only to express the status of his own theological and cosmological views but also to conceptualise traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as a cohesive system of beliefs. This system of beliefs comprises the interrelated and mutually reinforcing views that the gods are fundamentally human-like in biological, physical, cognitive, behavioural, moral, and political respects. The chapter explores Xenophanes’ critique of the different aspects of this system of beliefs, as well as the sources and grounds that underpin it. Finally, the chapter considers how Xenophanes closely relates expectations for veracity, propriety, and socio-political benefit in a way that suggests a requirement for harmony between religious belief and practice and, therefore, a conception of religious practice as theologically loaded. In the final analysis, Xenophanes teaches the modern student of Greek religion that a Greek thinker of the late sixth and early fifth centuries BCE had the conceptual and expressive resources to articulate a conception of traditional, panhellenic religious attitudes as, at bottom, a system of beliefs.

Chapter 2 compares three narratives that construe landscapes as multi-scalar relational fields. In Amitav Ghosh’s The Hungry Tide (2004), Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes (1999), and A. S. Byatt’s ‘A Stone Woman’ (2003), environments are cast not as settings but as living actors of the story. I read these poetics through anthropologist Tim Ingold’s conceptualisation of landscape as a meshwork of entangled lines of life, to suggest that these fictions turn landscapes into mediators connecting human with ecosystemic scales, and biological temporality with ‘geostory’. My analysis focuses on the recurring trope of the microcosm, which allows fiction to explore large-scale ecological disruption through smaller organisms and environments. The microcosm, I argue, is a figure in tension, which acts here simultaneously as a trans-scalar viewing instrument and as a disruptor of relations between scales. I read this trope as a critical tool of ecological awareness because it foregrounds and questions scalar collapse – the epistemic projection of one scale onto another.

Neoclassical theists reject the traditional divine attributes of impassibility and immutability, holding that God can be affected by the things he has created and is thus changeable. Some claim, for example, that God undergoes changes in emotional state, has desires that can be either satisfied or frustrated, grows in knowledge, and can suffer. I argue that this position rests on a simplistic distortion of perfect being theology grounded in highly contestable intuitions and conceptually sloppy usage of key terms (such as “emotion” and “knowledge”). By contrast, the first-cause theology of Thomism is grounded in a rigorously worked-out metaphysics that neoclassical writers typically engage with only superficially if at all. Nor is “neoclassical” theism really new, but in fact marks a regression to a crudely anthropomorphic conception of God that Western thought moved beyond at the time of Xenophanes.

In Chapter 7, “Upgrades in the Age of Generative AI,” we consider the hype around generative AI tools, like ChatGPT, and explain how the razzle-dazzle has captured the public’s imagination, even as the technology hasn’t come close to being artificial general intelligence—the goal companies like OpenAI aspire for. While tech giants race to develop generative AI products, we emphasize that they currently are sophisticated pattern-matching systems that simulate intelligence without truly understanding it. Analyzing both negative (political campaigns) and positive (the possibility of helping doctors communicate more empathetically over patient portals) examples, we offer recommendations for spotting uses of generative AI to avoid and how technological upgrades can be carefully and ethically integrated into communication systems to improve human welfare.

This chapter explores the emergence of an animal biopolitics at the start of the eighteenth century, when English and Italian governments instituted a new method for controlling rinderpest outbreaks in Europe: the state-sponsored killing of infected animals. This stamping out method transferred powers traditionally invested in farmers and cattle traders to government officials, forcing those same officials to justify their actions in ways that redefined the relationships between citizen and state. This redefinition troubled literary figures from a variety of political orientations, raising fears that this new power over animal populations might be brought to bear upon the growing human populations in Europe. Such fears are vividly expressed in major and minor works of eighteenth-century literature, from the Houyhnhnms’ proposal to exterminate the Yahoos in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels to the curious manner by which the anxieties of agricultural laborers are juxtaposed with images of human slaughter in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”

Because the COVID-19 pandemic likely originated in bat populations before crossing over to humans, its epidemiological history offers many opportunities to rethink our relationships with the nonhuman world. This history might remind us that humans and other animals are equally subject to microbial infection, and the diseases that affect nonhuman communities have clear analogs in and often cross over into human communities. But as this chapter argues, in a sharp contrast with the literature of earlier epizootics, the emerging cultural narratives of COVID-19 tend to reinforce the differences between the human and the nonhuman and the importance of keeping those two worlds physically and conceptually separate. With a few notable exceptions, COVID-inspired literature written during the pandemic tends to view the widespread lockdowns as beneficial to the animal world. Setting these narratives of ecosystem renewal alongside rarer literary works that reveal COVID’s devastating effects upon animals, the chapter shows why literary scholars invested in human–animal entanglements should consider COVID as an inter-species event and what difficulties we must overcome in telling that story.

This chapter explores studies in psychology and related disciplines on human–animal relationships. It examines anthropomorphism, the tendency to attribute human-like traits to animals, and its opposite, anthropodenial – the refusal to acknowledge similarities between humans and animals. It also discusses the meat paradox: the psychological conflict between valuing animal welfare and consuming meat.

Following a brief historical overview of the birth of the organised movement, Chapter 1 introduces literary figures and texts promoted by antivivisection periodicals such as the Zoophilist, the Home Chronicler, and the Animals Guardian. Adopting a literary-critical approach offers a fresh perspective on the movement’s association pamphlets and periodicals which have, thus far, largely been examined as historical documents. Poems, stories, and ‘humane words’ from notable writers were sourced and deployed to shape a common antivivisectionist identity, articulate the movement’s ideology, and mobilise activists. Analysis of antivivisection poems by Christina Rossetti, Robert Browning, Alfred Tennyson, and Robert Buchanan is complemented by attention to the framing and reception of these works in antivivisection publications and the wider press.

This chapter addresses some of the scientific, philosophical and theological arguments brought to bear on the debates surrounding human–robot relationships. Noting that we define robots through our relationships with them, it shows how factors such as emotion and agency can indicate things such as a theory of mind that condition users to expect reciprocal relationships that model a sense of partnership. These factors are important in ‘lovotics’, or a trend in social robotics to produce robots that people want to develop relationships with. Such relationships, however, at least given current capabilities in robotics, will always fall short of conditioned expectations because robots, rather than being full partners, are largely reducible to the self or user. The chapter introduces the notions of anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism to demonstrate these critiques, and then moves on to consider alternative figurations of relationships – drawing in particular on articulations of relationality – that may enable us to rethink how we image and imagine robots.

This chapter challenges the supposed transformation “from Baal Hammon to Saturn” in North Africa one of the chief grounds upon which narratives of cultural continuity are predicated. It argues that instead of simple syncretism or the persistence of a god, the material signs used to construct and identify the deity to whom stelae were dedicated underwent important transformations in the second and third centuries CE, changes closely tied to the experiences and practices of empire. Stelae of the third and second centuries BCE made a god present indexically; stelae of the imperial period embraced iconicity in ways that were entangled with empire, including new divine epithets tied to imperial authority and new road systems in the province. And by the end of the second century CE, this iconic system could even work to perpetuate clear social hierarchies.