Kržić, Marijo: Linguistic Boundary Work and the Ontological Defense of Human Exceptionalism in AI Discourse

_Zenodo_. 2026This paper examines the systematic linguistic asymmetry present in contemporary discourse surrounding artificial intelligence, particularly large language models (LLMs). While human cognition is commonly described through concepts such as understanding, reasoning, empathy, and intentionality, functionally comparable processes in AI systems are routinely reframed through mechanistic terminology including pattern matching, token prediction, and probabilistic inference. Drawing from c