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.
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.