Are you annoyed with the anthropomorphizing language being used in the "AI" discourse, but not sure how to talk about this stuff without it?

[martinvermeer@fediscience.org]

@laslab @emilymbender @Petesmom @Mimesatwork

> factuality violation has a connotation that all other output is factual right

But that is the case, even if only by accident!

No, my reservation is that it suggests a formal error condition, like zerodivide or floating-point overflow, when in reality it is just a variant of normal operation. You cannot even know it happened until you, as a human, introduce external information...

[stitam@fosstodon.org]

@emilymbender

Super interesting topic, thank you. For wider adoption I think it would be desirable to find alternatives that are also neutral in their sentiment. I spent some time thinking about "agentic AI" where the proposed alternative was "probabilistic, unverified software manipulator" which I think is very far from neutral. What do you think about "language-guided iterative solver"?

[mjj@mstdn.dk]

@emilymbender As we used to say, 'Knowledge wants to be free! But maybe it does not want to be anthropomorphized'

[michelpatrice@jasette.facil.services]

@emilymbender

« hallucination → undesirable output »

Why not a more straighforward "erroneous outpout"?

An undesirable result could a result that is accurate but that is not the one I am looking for. A made-up quote is more than undesirable, it is erroneous.

[michelpatrice@jasette.facil.services]

@emilymbender

« Pronouns are chosen each time, and avoiding pronouns usually reserved for people (and pets), e.g. he, she, and singular they is a good first step. »

Isn't singular they "it"?

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@MichelPatrice Hey it's fine to not know the details of the grammar of a language, but if you have a question, maybe don't phrase it as a "correction" to the person who wrote the piece you're responding to?

[europlus@social.europlus.zone]

@emilymbender I refuse to say “answers“ and call them “answer-shaped outputs”.

[michelpatrice@jasette.facil.services]

@emilymbender

My question can be read in a sarcastic voice or as a genuine question. In writing, unfortunately, the vocal intonation is lost. I guess that as some things are lost in translation, some things are lost in the translation from speech to text.

My genuine question remains, isn't singular they "it"? Or is there a nuance that I'm not getting?

As a linguist and as an english speaker, I guess that you are often confronted to the occasional awkwardness of non-native english speakers.

[picard@mas.to]

@emilymbender fantastic piece. thanks. the earlier piece you linked was kind of life-changing for me. in the sense that it re-framed my perspective in a fundamental way. since it i have been thinking a lot about it and changing the language i used, and felt kind of gratified that some of what write in the follow-up is stuff i had been thinking. i mean obviously you wrote a lot more but still felt pleased i'd been thinking along the right lines. thank you for sharing your expertise with us.

[cassandra@ottawa.place]

@emilymbender Thanks. I've been calling it the plausible sentence machine.

If "undesirable" output is too emotive, how about "unreliable" output?

[morningsong@weirder.earth]

@emilymbender since freaking 2022, i've haaaated that the sloplords successfully got everyone to call theil nonsense outputs "hallucinations"

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@MichelPatrice
English has one plural pronoun (they) that doesn't mark gender or animacy. It has four standard singular pronouns (setting aside neopronouns):

it - singular, inanimate
he - singular, animate, masculine
she - singular, animate, feminine
they - singular, animate

Singular they, i.e. the pronoun they used to refer to a person, has been a part of English since at least the time of Chaucer, used when the gender of the referent was unknown or irrelevant.

>>

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@MichelPatrice More recently, singular they has been adopted as a pronoun to refer to non-binary and agender individuals.

>>

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@MichelPatrice Bonus English linguistics lesson: When you ask a question with a negative ("Isn't the answer X?") you are introducing a strong presupposition that the answer is X.

In the context of your question, posed to a linguist about the article she had written, comes off (oh so typically for Mastodon) as not a question but a correction.

>>

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@MichelPatrice Et puis honnêtement, je trouve que le même phénomène arrive in français. «Le singulier du pronom « they », n'est-ce pas « it »?»

[michelpatrice@jasette.facil.services]

@emilymbender

Interesting, I did not get that this singular they thing existed before, I thought that it appeared with the new non-binary vocabulary.

Again, and I'm not correcting you, this is a genuine question, why not "it" since AI, being a machine, is inanimate?

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@MichelPatrice Yes, of course, use 'it'. Where do you see me saying not to?

The piece you are responding to says:

"avoiding pronouns usually reserved for people (and pets), e.g. he, she, and singular they is a good first step."

[michelpatrice@jasette.facil.services]

@emilymbender

En tant que québécois, je dirais plutôt « Le singulier du pronom "they", c'est pas "it"? » et ça pourrait être aussi bien une question qu'une correction, selon l'intonation.

[michelpatrice@jasette.facil.services]

@emilymbender

I get it. This singular they part was confusing, I guess. Désolé, je posais une question et je ne voulais pas en faire toute une histoire.

[emilymbender@dair-community.social]

@MichelPatrice Ah, so you are familiar with singular 'they' used to refer to non-binary people.

I was giving you the benefit of the doubt as an L2 English speaker that perhaps you weren't familiar with that usage.

Now I suspect you are just being rude about people's pronouns here and making some dehumanizing joke.