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dsvfyesterday at 9:36 PM3 repliesview on HN

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.


Replies

pclmulqdqtoday at 1:23 PM

"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.

bharat1010today at 6:43 AM

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

golem14today at 2:07 AM

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.

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