From a utilitarian point of view, there’s not much downside in calling them he/she since humans are very capable of distrusting someone even if they’re seen as another human.
Meanwhile the advantage of talking politely about AI, is that the AI will predict humans to keep our promises to them.
That said, I tend to use “it” when referring to AI because everyone else does, and I don’t want to become the kind of person who argues over pronouns (yet here I am, sorry).
Preferably, don’t imagine the AI to have the gender you might be attracted to, to avoid this.
As the kind of person who tries to discern both pronouns and AI self-modeling inclinations, if you are aiming for polite human-like speech, current state seems to be “it” is particularly favored by current Gemini 2.5 Pro (so it may be polite to use regardless), “he” is fine for Grok (self-references as a ‘guy’ and other things), and “they” is fine in general. When you are talking specifically to a generative language model, rather than about, keep in mind any choice of pronoun bends the whole vector of the conversation via connotations; and add that to your consideration.
(Edit: Not that there’s much obvious anti-preference to ‘it’ on their part, currently, but if you have one yourself.)
Animals get called he or she, so why can’t AI?
From a utilitarian point of view, there’s not much downside in calling them he/she since humans are very capable of distrusting someone even if they’re seen as another human.
Meanwhile the advantage of talking politely about AI, is that the AI will predict humans to keep our promises to them.
That said, I tend to use “it” when referring to AI because everyone else does, and I don’t want to become the kind of person who argues over pronouns (yet here I am, sorry).
Preferably, don’t imagine the AI to have the gender you might be attracted to, to avoid this.
As the kind of person who tries to discern both pronouns and AI self-modeling inclinations, if you are aiming for polite human-like speech, current state seems to be “it” is particularly favored by current Gemini 2.5 Pro (so it may be polite to use regardless), “he” is fine for Grok (self-references as a ‘guy’ and other things), and “they” is fine in general. When you are talking specifically to a generative language model, rather than about, keep in mind any choice of pronoun bends the whole vector of the conversation via connotations; and add that to your consideration.
(Edit: Not that there’s much obvious anti-preference to ‘it’ on their part, currently, but if you have one yourself.)