Mentalistic Stances Towards AI Systems: Beyond the Intentional Stance

Under what circumstances do we attribute a mind to AI systems? And, in this case, how do we think their mind works? Answering these questions is crucial to inform the design of safe and trustable AI, to inform research on the ethical, social and legal issues raised by the increasing presence of AI systems in everyday life and to investigate how they can be used as tools to study human and social cognition. This work proposes a philosophical reflection on the possible structure of people’s mental models of AI systems. We distinguish between two possible styles of modeling that people may adopt in everyday contexts. Both involve the attribution of mental states and cognitive abilities to the AI system, even though they differ from one another in some relevant aspects. One modeling style is akin to folk psychology and relies on the attribution of beliefs, desires, and other propositional attitudes to the system. The other, which we will refer to as folk-cognitivist, is more akin to the account of the structure of the mind that characterizes classical cognitive science. These modeling styles correspond to different classes of mentalistic stances that people may adopt when they interact with AI systems in ordinary contexts.