This is just an artifact from the research community, who tend to use anthropomorphic terms like this as efficient shorthand. And TBH this is part of a bigger

This is just an artifact from the research community, who tend to use anthropomorphic terms like this as efficient shorthand. And TBH this is part of a bigger common pattern: students/researchers write all this stuff with the goal of turning in papers, but the code/terminology/whatever runs into issues when its usage blows up and bleeds into the real world.