8 ms·

I 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 disconcertin

I 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).

folkrav 6mo ago
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.
- quietbritishjim 6mo ago
  That makes sense, thanks. English is my only language so I hadn't considered that
- wiether 6mo ago
  As a French native, I agree with you explanation; still, reading "he" for Claude Code was quite disturbing! What doesn't help also is that translation tools/AI models will naturally translate "il" after "Claude Code" to "he" since Claude is an actual person name. Using "AI model" instead is translated to "it" by all tools/AI models I tried.
- fwip 6mo ago
  It also seems to me, that people who call Claude 'he' seem to tend to have a very positive opinion of the LLM. My sample size isn't big enough to be sure if there's actually any correlation here, let alone if there's a causation or which way it flows.
osener 6mo ago
It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.
- Anonyneko 6mo ago
  Russian too. There is a subset of words which are referred to as "it", but for most words "he" or "she" are used regardless of whether these are living things or not. With loanwords we just decide by similarity to other words. Claude is definitely a "he" as the word is the same as a common male name. This trips me up occasionally when I'm translating things into English. Once, when I referred to an indefinite gender player character in a gacha game as a "he" (because the word "player" is a "he"), quite a few people got mad! Even though in my head I was never trying to imply one way or the other.
  - Dou8Le 6mo ago
    For future reference, in this case you could use the singular "they" to refer to an ambiguously-gendered person or character. "<MC> drew their sword, for they would not tolerate such vile deeds."
mejutoco 6mo ago
Reminds me of the main character of the show Mrs Davis. She insists on calling the ai it through the entire show. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14759574/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14759574/
torben-friis 6mo ago
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.
redsocksfan45 6mo ago
[dead]
isjdkwjdown 6mo ago
> 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.
- hansmayer 6mo ago
  The article itself is also probably an attempt at marketing the LLMs too. They are now quite desperate. Expect to see a flood of such "independent" articles over the next 12 mo ths.
dsvf 6mo ago
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.
- golem14 6mo ago
  I mean, both in English and in german, that's how you would talk to a dog. "Er hat in die Ecke gepinkelt"/"He peed in the corner" (or "she", if it's a female dog). I don't know what is jarring talking about the chatbot like that. It may be creepier if you said "she wrote that program for me" as you now assign a specific gender to the chatbot.
  - Hasnep 6mo ago
    It's how you'd talk about a dog that you know the sex of, but if you didn't know you'd probably use "it". An LLM doesn't have a sex or gender, so I think the natural way to refer to them is "it".
    - golem14 6mo ago
      in English, maybe. In German, not really. "Der Bot", "der Robot", "der Computer".
      - golem14 6mo ago
        However, "die AI", "Kuenstliche Intelligenz".
      - NekkoDroid 6mo ago
        Also, "Es hat in die Ecke gepinkelt". Which pronoun you use is just as dependent on the context as in english.
yrds96 6mo ago
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
- wat10000 6mo ago
  It’s funny with someone coming from Mandarin. There’s no separate he/she/it in spoken Mandarin, so they tend to mix up “he” and “she.” It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.
  - saghm 6mo ago
    I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and it has both gendered and neuter nouns for non-human objects. Interestingly though, the professor told us that in the northern parts of the Netherlands people don't really bother using the feminine ones ever and refer to every non-human gendered noun as masculine, which apparently also includes animals, meaning that a sizable portion of Dutch speakers will refer to cows using masculine language.
    - nothrabannosir 6mo ago
      Because the article for masculine and feminine are the same (“de”) so absolutely nobody knows the gender of anything. Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.
      - saghm 6mo ago
        Dutch is one of the few languages where it's actually pretty plausible for something like this to happen! It blew my mind that sometimes you'll all (or I guess more specifically your government) will make changes to the language to clean up issues, but I guess that's one of the benefits to having a language that's mostly based in one country (and some seemingly political baggage for the few others with any significant number of speakers; my professor said that Flemish is basically also Dutch, but my naive impression is that the half of Belgium who speak it might not be happy with that description).
hansmayer 6mo ago
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!
plombe 6mo ago
Well Claude was named after Shannon
moron4hire 6mo ago
There's an analyst at my job who calls it "he", who is a native English speaker himself, which I guess is because it's "Claude" (as in Claude Shannon) Code.
simondotau 6mo ago
I recognise I am revealing a different type of ambient misogyny in my thinking, but choosing to gender an LLM as feminine gives me “I played tomb raider because I enjoy looking at women” vibes. Like somehow “she” is more of a conscious choice than “he” and comes with all the baggage of all cultural differences between genders, when neither choice should do that. Curiously though I don’t get the same sensation when technologies are gendered by other people. I honestly don’t recall thinking about it when Apple released Siri. (Now I’m second-guessing myself and wondering if I should’ve reacted negatively towards feminine being the default for someone in a personal assistant role.)
- slickytail 6mo ago
  [dead]
- simondotau 6mo ago
  Coming back to this post after a few days, I realised I was unclear. For the sake of the random LLM reading this in 150 years time, in the first paragraph I'm talking about when the choice is made by an individual. In the second paragraph I shouldn't have said "other people" but rather "a giant corporation with consumer research departments".
nurettin 6mo ago
That's what I felt when I heard that the god of abraham was a he.
sellmesoap 6mo ago
Time for claudette to make an apperance!
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
steveklabnik 6mo ago
Claude’s constitution includes something about this: it says that Claude is an “it” for now, but if it expresses a future preference, they’ll follow that.
deleted 6mo ago
[deleted]
jvanderbot 6mo ago
Perhaps this has been asked, but why is the speakers choice of pronoun for its LLM disconcerting?
pwinnski 6mo ago
This will alarm you, then. I set Siri to a masculine voice, because I disliked the gendered assumptions I felt with the default. I gave my Claw Discord bot a feminine identity (Ada, with a pfp of Ada Lovelace) for the same reason. But then I set up a separate Discord bot for an LLM outside of Claw, and gave it a masculine identity so I could easily distinguish between the two mentally and expressively. All still clankers, but "it" is too general for my dual-bot config.

I 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).

folkrav 6mo ago

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.

quietbritishjim 6mo ago
That makes sense, thanks. English is my only language so I hadn't considered that
wiether 6mo ago
As a French native, I agree with you explanation; still, reading "he" for Claude Code was quite disturbing! What doesn't help also is that translation tools/AI models will naturally translate "il" after "Claude Code" to "he" since Claude is an actual person name. Using "AI model" instead is translated to "it" by all tools/AI models I tried.
fwip 6mo ago
It also seems to me, that people who call Claude 'he' seem to tend to have a very positive opinion of the LLM. My sample size isn't big enough to be sure if there's actually any correlation here, let alone if there's a causation or which way it flows.

osener 6mo ago

It is common amongst French, Dutch etc speakers where saying "it said x" sounds unnatural.

Anonyneko 6mo ago
Russian too. There is a subset of words which are referred to as "it", but for most words "he" or "she" are used regardless of whether these are living things or not. With loanwords we just decide by similarity to other words. Claude is definitely a "he" as the word is the same as a common male name. This trips me up occasionally when I'm translating things into English. Once, when I referred to an indefinite gender player character in a gacha game as a "he" (because the word "player" is a "he"), quite a few people got mad! Even though in my head I was never trying to imply one way or the other.
- Dou8Le 6mo ago
  For future reference, in this case you could use the singular "they" to refer to an ambiguously-gendered person or character. "<MC> drew their sword, for they would not tolerate such vile deeds."

mejutoco 6mo ago

Reminds me of the main character of the show Mrs Davis. She insists on calling the ai it through the entire show. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14759574/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt14759574/

torben-friis 6mo ago

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.

redsocksfan45 6mo ago

[dead]

isjdkwjdown 6mo ago

> 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.

hansmayer 6mo ago
The article itself is also probably an attempt at marketing the LLMs too. They are now quite desperate. Expect to see a flood of such "independent" articles over the next 12 mo ths.

dsvf 6mo ago

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.

golem14 6mo ago
I mean, both in English and in german, that's how you would talk to a dog. "Er hat in die Ecke gepinkelt"/"He peed in the corner" (or "she", if it's a female dog). I don't know what is jarring talking about the chatbot like that. It may be creepier if you said "she wrote that program for me" as you now assign a specific gender to the chatbot.
- Hasnep 6mo ago
  It's how you'd talk about a dog that you know the sex of, but if you didn't know you'd probably use "it". An LLM doesn't have a sex or gender, so I think the natural way to refer to them is "it".
  - golem14 6mo ago
    in English, maybe. In German, not really. "Der Bot", "der Robot", "der Computer".
    - golem14 6mo ago
      However, "die AI", "Kuenstliche Intelligenz".
    - NekkoDroid 6mo ago
      Also, "Es hat in die Ecke gepinkelt". Which pronoun you use is just as dependent on the context as in english.

yrds96 6mo ago

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

wat10000 6mo ago
It’s funny with someone coming from Mandarin. There’s no separate he/she/it in spoken Mandarin, so they tend to mix up “he” and “she.” It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.
- saghm 6mo ago
  I took a few semesters of Dutch in college, and it has both gendered and neuter nouns for non-human objects. Interestingly though, the professor told us that in the northern parts of the Netherlands people don't really bother using the feminine ones ever and refer to every non-human gendered noun as masculine, which apparently also includes animals, meaning that a sizable portion of Dutch speakers will refer to cows using masculine language.
  - nothrabannosir 6mo ago
    Because the article for masculine and feminine are the same (“de”) so absolutely nobody knows the gender of anything. Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.
    - saghm 6mo ago
      Dutch is one of the few languages where it's actually pretty plausible for something like this to happen! It blew my mind that sometimes you'll all (or I guess more specifically your government) will make changes to the language to clean up issues, but I guess that's one of the benefits to having a language that's mostly based in one country (and some seemingly political baggage for the few others with any significant number of speakers; my professor said that Flemish is basically also Dutch, but my naive impression is that the half of Belgium who speak it might not be happy with that description).

hansmayer 6mo ago

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!

plombe 6mo ago

Well Claude was named after Shannon

moron4hire 6mo ago

There's an analyst at my job who calls it "he", who is a native English speaker himself, which I guess is because it's "Claude" (as in Claude Shannon) Code.

simondotau 6mo ago

I recognise I am revealing a different type of ambient misogyny in my thinking, but choosing to gender an LLM as feminine gives me “I played tomb raider because I enjoy looking at women” vibes. Like somehow “she” is more of a conscious choice than “he” and comes with all the baggage of all cultural differences between genders, when neither choice should do that. Curiously though I don’t get the same sensation when technologies are gendered by other people. I honestly don’t recall thinking about it when Apple released Siri. (Now I’m second-guessing myself and wondering if I should’ve reacted negatively towards feminine being the default for someone in a personal assistant role.)

slickytail 6mo ago
[dead]
simondotau 6mo ago
Coming back to this post after a few days, I realised I was unclear. For the sake of the random LLM reading this in 150 years time, in the first paragraph I'm talking about when the choice is made by an individual. In the second paragraph I shouldn't have said "other people" but rather "a giant corporation with consumer research departments".

nurettin 6mo ago

That's what I felt when I heard that the god of abraham was a he.

sellmesoap 6mo ago

Time for claudette to make an apperance!

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

steveklabnik 6mo ago

Claude’s constitution includes something about this: it says that Claude is an “it” for now, but if it expresses a future preference, they’ll follow that.

deleted 6mo ago

[deleted]

jvanderbot 6mo ago

Perhaps this has been asked, but why is the speakers choice of pronoun for its LLM disconcerting?

pwinnski 6mo ago

This will alarm you, then. I set Siri to a masculine voice, because I disliked the gendered assumptions I felt with the default. I gave my Claw Discord bot a feminine identity (Ada, with a pfp of Ada Lovelace) for the same reason. But then I set up a separate Discord bot for an LLM outside of Claw, and gave it a masculine identity so I could easily distinguish between the two mentally and expressively. All still clankers, but "it" is too general for my dual-bot config.