Lex Fridman: uncertainty

Transcript context

…It’s weird because I think that a lot of people prefer he for Claude, I actually kind of like that. I think Claude is usually, it’s slightly male leaning, but it can be male or female, which is quite nice. I still use it, and I have mixed feelings about this. I now just think of it as, or I think of the it pronoun for Claude as, I don’t know, it’s just the one I associate with Claude. I can imagine people moving to he or she. It feels somehow disrespectful. I’m denying the intelligence of this entity by calling it it, I remember always don’t gender the robots, but I don’t know, I anthropomorphize pretty quickly and construct a backstory in my head. I’ve wondered if I anthropomorphize things too much. Because I have this with my car, especially my car and bikes. I don’t give them names because then I used to name my bikes and then I had a bike that got stolen and I cried for a week and I was like, if I’d never given a name, I wouldn’t been so upset, felt like I’d let it down. I’ve wondered as well, it might depend on how much it feels like a kind of objectifying pronoun if you just think of it as this is a pronoun that objects often have and maybe AIs can have that pronoun. And that doesn’t mean that I think of if I call Claude it, that I think of it as less intelligent or I’m being disrespectful just, I’m like you are a different kind of entity. And so I’m going to give you the respectful it.…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.