It doesn't help that the marketing leans heavily on anthropomorphizing LLMs either, IMHO.
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.
So that's another, maybe more harmless reason for it.
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.
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
Like how in English you’d say “it helps me …” but in Spanish just “me ayuda …”
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).
Source: am Dutch. Can’t wait for us to just ditch gendered nouns.
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.
Signé -Un Québécois
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.)
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.
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.