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Comment by greatgib | Hacker News Reader

This story is kind of old. But also I'm suspicious that this was an AI generated content due to this weird paragraph (one becoming "they"):

   It's worth noting that there was one developer who wrote all of this code. They left AECL in 1986, and thankfully for them, no one has ever revealed their identity. And while it may be tempting to lay the blame at their feet—they made every technical choice, they coded every bug—it would be wildly unfair to do that.

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'They' is a correct singular form for a person of unknown gender. Modern writing overwhelmingly uses it instead of 'he or she', but it has always been correct, has been predominant for a long time, and furthermore it doesn't have anything to do with AI, nor was AI viable as an authoring tool when this article was written, nor is Remy ever going to sell out. What a bizarre comment.

Singular "they" has been used since at least the 14th century—was generative AI commonly available then? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Singular_they

I’ve been writing on the Internet since very early days, and have put almost twenty years into The Daily Wtf specifically. Which means I’m actually over represented in the training set. I don’t write like AI. AI writes like me.

I am really amazed by the frequency and the quality of your output.

Would you have an article on your routines, how you structure your day / work? Essentially, what enables your consistency, and quality articles?

Isn’t that the pronoun to use when you’re unsure of gender? This article didn’t feel AI-y to me.

The correct neutral pronoun in English is "he", though using "they" has been very popular in recent years due to a mistaken belief that it's sexist to use the male pronoun that way. I wouldn't say it's an AI smell at all.

“They” has, in fact, been popular for gender neutral singular use since before the Latin-inspired prescriptivist movement and its attempts to install as “correct” various things that were previously either not dominant or in some cases entirely foreign to English; that movement's influence had actually been fading on that usage and in general for decades even before concerns about sexism in language became significant; singular “they” is no more incorrect than the now-so-universal-most-have-forgotten-the-actual-singular use of the second-person plural when the semantics are in fact singular.

Not only is "he" not the "correct" pronoun (however you think "correctness" is defined), it also sounds terribly clunky and confusing. "They" is perfectly natural.

That is 100% standard english, dude. I feel like I might have read that exact sentence 20 years ago...

It writes that way because almost everyone writes that way these days. It's annoying if you learned English grammar from textbooks and other materials written over 50 years ago, but it's extremely common now anyway. So a large chunk of its training data will be that way.

It's interesting, because all the older works in its training data will default to the masculine singular, and that has to be a massive number of books too. But maybe the modern writing, including lots of online sources, simply overwhelms that. Or it's one of the guardrails written into the AIs to avoid offending people.

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