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Comment by stcg | Hacker News Reader

That's interesting, what language is that?

Also, is it possible to give a prompt to make ChatGPT switch to feminine gender?

Many gendered languages use male gender as the default when it's ambiguous or unknown, so that would be expected behavior.

And yes, it's absolutely possible to make it switch to whatever gender you want, and generally to pretend to be whatever you want it to be. The identity comes from the conversation context (including all the hidden messages), not from the LLM.

It's the default when speaking about groups of people or people whose identity isn't known. But if someone speaks about themselves then they have to choose the right one.

This is also something that language learners have to pay attention to - to not sound weird.

The right one in this case is "doesn't have a gender", so what does that correspond to in your language? In mine, that would be neuter, and GPT-4 seems to prefer that.

My language has only masculine and feminine genders. There's no neuter gender. And there isn't anything like "singular they" either.

"Chatbot" and "language model" are both masculine so, I guess that's why ChatGPT uses "masculine it" when speaking about itself.

It's Latvian. But, I guess it acts the same when speaking other gendered languages.

Both "chatbot" and "large language model" are masculine - so this is why it picked the masculine gender, I guess.

I was asking it about its training dataset and when it said "I've been trained on..." it picked the masculine form of the word "trained". This is why machine translation is a hard problem to solve. Things like this can easily get lost in translation.

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