SwooshBakery624 [they/them]Vim's lead maintainer has fully lost his goddamn mind
maegul (he/they)Couldn’t help but notice the casual gendering of Claude to “he” as well.
Someone somewhere made the important observation not long ago that computer assistants tended to be gendered female when more like a secretary (Siri and Alexa) but now that AIs are “intelligent” and powerful … Claude now has to be a male.
Especially weird (and telling?) when it is objectively gender neutral as it’s not human.
TheTechnician27Couldn’t help but notice the casual gendering of Claude to “he” as well.
“Claude” is a male given name. If you think it’s actually a problem, blame Anthropic for giving their LLM a gendered name. I’ve never gendered AI assistants, but I’m not going to begrudge people who do when it’s in the name (or in the case of old Siri, the voice, which would later be the default rather than only option).
Women named “Claude” exist, but they’re staggeringly outnumbered by men to a point where most people don’t even know of women named “Claude” – let alone would immediately associate it as masculine.
it’s extremely telling however the shift in marketing. i don’t believe giving the coding plagiarism bot a male name is coincidental. most feminists would probably agree. we’ve known for decades that chatbots were given female names because they’re trying to reenact some tradwife fetish and attract a male audience
it’s extremely telling however the shift in marketing
And your hypothesis doesn’t fall apart now why, exactly? AI assistants are more secretary-like than they’ve ever been. “Write me an email.” “Proofread my work.” Beyond that, people are using LLMs as substitutes for significant others.
And yet now, Microsoft migrated “Cortana” to “Copilot”, Siri is more gender-neutral than ever, Alexa still exists off massive brand recognition, and other major AI services are called e.g. “ChatGPT”, “Claude”, “DeepSeek”, and “Grok”. Collectively, that’s gender-neutral.
At most, the hypothesis used to be true but isn’t anymore, because you can literally make an LLM act like a tradwife now if you’re so debased inclined, yet the names are broadly neutral. The MIT Press has a good, lengthy article about the history of gender in speech synthesis, as an aside.
Yes, because the person I was replying to said:
Couldn’t help but notice the casual gendering of Claude to “he” as well.
“Casual gendering” is implying the Vim author calling Claude “he” was totally out of the blue. It’s not “casual”; it’s something Anthropic baked in by giving it a male name.
Sure, I know what “casual” means and that out of the meanings, a more apt one I should’ve chosen would’ve been “incidental”. That doesn’t change my overall point that they’re putting the entire onus of the gendering on the author as though it isn’t the same as someone calling Alexa “she”.
Replace this entire scenario with someone calling Alexa “she”: the accusation of “casual gendering” would obviously be ridiculous, because Alexa has a popular female given name.
Not blaming anyone, this is social commentary.
But like the neutral “it” is right there.
In a world that’s both charged around gender and pronoun usage, and focused on the nature and value of LLMs … I think it’s weird that there isn’t more commonly pushback enforcing the non-human neutral for the simple reason that it’s an objective fact amidst a swampy pool of (mis-)information synthesis.
A little like the bechdel test, I feel like it’s the casualness and indifference around this gender bias (at least at the moment) that’s interesting and telling.
Claude is neutral and can be given to women too. Though it lost popularity over the male version.
There is even a fruit called “La reine Claude” which back translates to the queen Claude.
But yeah, Claude was male in my head too so I’m definitely guilty of that too despite knowing and actively trying not to anthropomorphize Large lying models
UltraGiGaGiganticClaudia?
Or maybe, just maybe, it has a guys name.
Good Lord y’all made up since crazy shit to whine about.
xepOh no! Another issue! I’m a jellyfish and can only respond to a limited number of stimuli at a time because I have not centralised nervous system capable of organising my critiques into diverse and disparate arguments! I can only talk about vanishingly simple problems that are one-dimensional enough for me to tunnel vision on repeating the same talking points, preferably no longer than a dozen syllables total to accomodate not having a long-term memory centre due to my aforementioned lack of a brain 🪼🥺
I am very tired and have gone absolutely overboard on this comment, to the person I’m responding to pls don’t take this personally, more rational, less sleepy me doesn’t want to be a troll. But SERIOUSLY? You’re argument isn’t even “this isn’t a problem”, it’s “I can’t see the value in doing a full deconstruction of this novel ethical scenario and just want to be a sheep saying it’s bad for the reason my favourite shepherd says so, not because of healthy discussion of ALL the pros and cons.” Reminds me of those cringe posts from a couple months ago where people were saying “the epstein files are a distraction! don’t forget about my favourite political issue {insert valid issue}”. I’m going to be a hypocrite for a second bc this long arse comment is 1,000,000x worse than yours, but consider why you’re commenting before you hit post next time.
That’s a lot of words you’re putting my mouth, and a lot of names you’re calling a stranger on the internet. But you seem like an alright person, so I hope your day gets better.
Let’s not lose focus more on the more immediate concern here, that this person is using a human pronoun to describe a computer.