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Comment by quietbritishjim | Hacker News Reader

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).

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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.

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.

That makes sense, thanks. English is my only language so I hadn't considered that

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.

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.

"Der Computer" is also masculine, so you have probably been calling your computer "he" for decades. Languages with gendered nouns don't quite have the same he/she/it distinction.

how does that matter if its he, 'she' till its doing the work. Its artificial, shouldnt try to find means of attachment to it

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.

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".

in English, maybe. In German, not really. "Der Bot", "der Robot", "der Computer".

Also, "Es hat in die Ecke gepinkelt". Which pronoun you use is just as dependent on the context as in english.

I have not met a single German that has ever uttered this sentence. (Relating to a dog, that is)

Neither have I, but mostly because either the person knows the gender of the animal or the situation just never came up. The closest that I would say is "Es scheißt gerne aufs Auto" when talking about pidgens (die Taube), but even then you generally talk about multiple, resulting in "Sie scheißen gerne aufs Auto"

Really ? "Es kackt auf's Auto" ? I guess, it might make sense when the person speaking has no specific bird on mind, but only thinks of "das Tier" (the animal). One could also say "er hat .. geckack (der Vogel)", but usually, people wouldn't say "er/sie/es", but use the fully specified noun ("die Taube ... hat..", "der Vogel ht ...", "ein Tier hat ...")

"Es kackt auf's Auto" feels slightly weird to me, if I didn't know whodunnit, I'd probably say something like "irgendwer hat mir aufs Auto gekackt" ("someone pooped on the car"), although there is a also "irgendwas hat mir aufs Auto gekackt" ("something pooped on the car"). My guess is the majority of German would choose the first sentence and anthropomorphize, but maybe I'm projecting.

It's an interesting question, after all. Thanks for bringing it up, haven't talked about pooping on cars for a while ;)

However, "die AI", "Kuenstliche Intelligenz".

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

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.

> 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.

As a native German speaker (where there exist 3 genera [1]), I can tell you how it feels:

The genus basically feels like a type of a variable in a programming language; if you use a wrong type for a variable in your computer program, you immdiately know that the program is wrong, and it won't compile.

Sometimes, you also can use specific words with a specific genus, so that a reference to it by pronouns gets unique (in terms of programming, I'd claim that this feels a little bit like doing register allocation by hand).

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.

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.

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).

I believe this is common to all the Romance languages.

In the Canadian French dialect all the swear words are incredibly versatile and church-related such as "osti" which I believe refers to the Eucharist.

It just so happens that for nouns beginning with a bowel, you drop the e or the a from le/la, and use an apostrophe.

So if you don't know if it's "le porte" or "la porte" you can use my favorite trick which is to shove osti in there and say "l'osti de porte" which roughly translates to "the goddamn door". You can do this for any noun in French, and Canadian French speakers will get it, though people from France will make fun of you.

Quite an imaginative technique you got there.

Signé -Un Québécois

Oui. i imagine what would happen if he came to someone with:

Ding dong... voici l'osti de pizza que l'osti de téléphone a commandé à partir de l'osti de maison. Maintenant donnes l'osti d'argent.

Indeed...

Weird. Don’t you have an equivalent to the Spanish “eso, esa”? Gendered object.

Portuguese is the same as Spanish here. In both cases you would avoid using a pronoun.

Like how in English you’d say “it helps me …” but in Spanish just “me ayuda …”

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.)

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".

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

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.

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."

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.

Well Claude was named after Shannon

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.

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/

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.

Time for claudette to make an apperance!

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.

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

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

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!

> 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.

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.

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