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Comment by kdkdkwndjekd | Hacker News Reader

I want it to use nothing. Use impersonal statements. Say “X was changed for Y” not “I changed X for Y”. As any tool would.

Finder doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to delete this file?”. Photoshop doesn’t ask “Do you want ME to save this file?”. Claude shouldn’t assume itself to be a person either.

> You could be writing from the perspective of a slab of concrete and you'd use "I".

Except this isn’t prose. Claude is not telling me a story from the point of view of a concrete slab. It is assuming personality to present objective facts. If my entire operating system can be interfaced with without it referring to itself as “I” then so can Claude.

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The problem you’re gonna run into is that you’re essentially asking it to use passive voice. Everyone with a high school education has been taught not to do that in English class. The vast majority of the prose in the training set was not written by functionally illiterate people.

Yeah okay, but if you want no pronouns at all then I think your comparison to "it" just confuses the issue. In the contexts where you would use "it", the "it" should use "I".

But I don't think I share your preference either. It's a lot easier to talk about what I decided to do and what the machine 'decided' to do if we attach pronouns. "X was changed" can be too vague.

> In the contexts where you would use "it", the "it" should use "I".

At this point you’re just arguing semantics for the sake of it. You know damn well what I mean and if you need more proof that it is perfectly possible and not at all unreasonable to want this just look at most software around you. None them talk like they are a person and those that do are often the most obnoxious and painful to use.

> You know damn well what I mean

I do. And I said to that "Yeah okay". No argument, chill out.

The rest of that line wasn't diagreement, it was explaining why your original comment was confusing.

> None them talk like they are a person

Which I explained with the rest of my post. They're all doing what I ask or automated tasks in a far simpler way. It's almost never unclear whether I did something or my OS did something. But when talking to an AI coding assistant that gets muddy very fast when pronouns are avoided.

I think you’re going to be swimming against the tide on this as computer interfaces are increasingly infused with AI at all levels (OS and apps). IMO, it’s more natural to anthropomorphize. Photoshop in 2010 was just an app, a tool that you wielded. But Photoshop in 2030 is going to be a “digital artistic assistant” that collaborates with you to design whatever you need. In that new world, “I” is more natural. Whether you like that or want it, it seems like that’s where we’re headed.

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