Animatistic Querying

Animatistic querying is a method of questioning a body of knowledge by instructing a large language model to speak as a non-human entity, such as a protein, a reagent or an object, and to describe its situation from that entity’s position. This short text defines the term, gives an example from cell-free protein synthesis (the enzyme DsbC, alone and in dialogue with glutathione), distinguishes the method from persona prompting and science-education role-play, states its main limit, and explains the choice of “animatistic” over “animistic.”