alt Hacker NewsI think this is the first time I've seen someone refer to an LLM as "he" rather than "it". No judgement, but I definitely found it interesting (and disconcerting).
Replies
I've heard it quite a bit before, but mostly from second-language speakers whose first language don't have impersonal third-person pronouns - e.g. French uses "il" or "elle" for all of "he", "she" or "it".
It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.
As a native German speaker, I have also referred to a chatbot in English as "he", and similar to you, a native English speaker, felt jarred by it. It was definitely not out of any personification or humanization though. In German, I would say it is "der Chatbot" (from "der Roboter"), which in German is a male noun so I would refer to it as "er" (the male pronoun) - which in my head I autotranslated to "he". Most of the time, though, I think of it (and refer to it) as an LLM, which is "das Sprachmodell" (neutrum), so I automatically translate it to "it".
So that's another, maybe more harmless reason for it.
I wouldn't read too much into it, it's natural for non native speakers. In Spanish for example, objects have grammatical gender as well, so it's easy to slip.
Reminds me of the main character of the show Mrs Davis. She insists on calling the ai it through the entire show.
Well Claude was named after Shannon
It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.
I mean we have all met that one cretin who will discuss over chat by pasting bulletpoints from an LLM. No wonder some of them think it is a living person!
[dead]
> No judgment
Yes judgment. Loads of it. Judge away.
This is just bizarre. Do not refer to this product of marketing-technology as you refer to a person. EVER.
It's not weird if it comes from ESL. At least in portuguese there's no "it" equivalent for pronouns or any other neutral artifact in the language, in other words, everything has a gender, even an AI model, the same goes for objects e.g.: knife(she), fork(he), spoon(she), plate(he).
People often commit mistakes regarding that, the same way we don't have "they" as pronoun to someone we don't know the gender, so we address to these people as "dele(dela)" (masculine and feminine pronouns).
But if this is coming from someone who has english as a primary language it's definetely weird to treat models as person