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.