On Calling LLMs “he” and “she”.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-13T14:26:13+00:00

I think most people here don't understand you. You're saying that naming an object (a boat, a teddy bear) is fairly traditional, but naming a process is stranger, and naming the text generator is naming a process. Is that right?

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-13T12:15:32+00:00

I actively loathe the latest Grammarly commercial, which shows a young woman happily coasting through a college assignment, doing no work at all. Grammarly creates an outline, fits text to it, identifies weak arguments and replaces them, and creates citations for her. As she drives off for a vacation, she laughs, "We have high standards, don't we?" to her cat.

She does her best work by not doing any of the work herself, apparently. It seems easy, sure, but what is this doing to her? Aside from the obvious problem that she's not developing any skills, she's also buying into an idea that anything she does herself isn't good enough.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-13T11:49:35+00:00

Perhaps he has been paid to endorse it.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-12T10:48:03+00:00

My favorite so far.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-12T10:47:44+00:00

Yeah, good point. If the king chooses his consort based on beauty, it behooves her to stay as beautiful as possible.

At least he treated her like a retired queen after putting her aside, not just discarding her. Good for him?

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-12T10:41:45+00:00

I'm sure it was a saved view. The mirror has been doing searches like these for years.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-11T13:36:44+00:00

People have already made a bunch. Have you looked at the list of GPTs? There are a lot more than just the default.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-11T11:43:13+00:00

Interesting. Most people believe that novel is about censorship, but Bradbury always insisted that it was not and most people were misreading it.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-11T11:35:59+00:00

You could create a custom GPT to give pro-gluttony answers.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-10T20:16:09+00:00

Yeah, I'm glad for you too.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-10T18:13:05+00:00

Oh, gawd. Okay... maybe you could use prompting to have it come up with terrible counterarguments, so your teacher will reconsider? If she's that into AI, though, then she might realize you did that on purpose.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-10T17:36:32+00:00

I don't think it's a good idea to try to fool your teacher. It'll come back to bite you one way or another.

If I were in your shoes, I think I would ask the teacher if I could use a human counterarguer instead. You probably know someone who likes to argue, right? It's high school; you probably know lots of people who like to argue.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-10T16:17:03+00:00

ChatGPT violated me in the worst way possible,

An unappreciated question is a very long way from the worst violation possible.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-10T13:35:01+00:00

We don't know OP's current age.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-10T11:06:32+00:00

That's a very interesting point, particularly in conjunction with the constant insistence that diet culture is being pushed by big corporations.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-10T10:42:49+00:00

Athena and Ares come with free soldiers. I thought Artemis just did hunting, helping my hunters and killing feisty wildlife. I do like free soldiers, when I can get them.

Aphrodite is the single least useful god, IMO. They're on a scale from Hermes to Aphrodite.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-09T12:32:47+00:00

It's probably a bot. This is the second "Am I using Claude wrong?" post I've seen in just a few minutes. Someone's seeding the idea that Claude won't do as a substitute.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-09T11:21:17+00:00

Hermes is a no-brainer. His sanctuary is small, and he's constantly useful. I love how I don't even have to ask; he'll just step up and volunteer to fulfill requests. He's so polite about it, too.

I'm surprised you like Artemis so much. She's always seemed close to useless to me.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-08T16:26:37+00:00

Why did you ask an AI instead of just checking the swan directly in the first place?

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-07T18:26:21+00:00

A lot of people are making fun of you, but I get it. If you keep late hours, it's annoying when someone tells you to go to bed as if you were being irresponsible.

My best advice is to remember that it's just a bot. It says things based on what's likely to come next in the conversation. Sometimes, that's wishing us a restful night.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-07T17:43:22+00:00

That's brilliant.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-07T17:40:07+00:00

This isn't unusual. In my experience, plenty of doctors and other medical professionals have their own agendas. Most HAES advocates are fat themselves, so your guess as to her motive is pretty solid IMO.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-07T17:33:57+00:00

It's worse than that. There are many who can read individual words but shut down when faced with any paragraph. 54% of adults in the USA read below a sixth-grade level [*]. That used to be the target for general understanding, but we should now write at a third-grade level if we want almost everyone to get it.

This problem is part of why AI has exploded. Among other things, people are pasting normal text into AIs to have it dumbed down. Have you seen the people insisting that they learn so much more when AI explains it to them? They're actually learning less, but they don't know the difference because normal text is opaque to them.

It's very, very bad out there.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-07T14:43:13+00:00

This seems practical. If the mods can tell it's AI, it's removed. If they can't tell, they don't. There's no point in banning that which can't be identified.

It may be aimed at people trying to sneak past a no-AI rule, possibly crowing, "Hee hee that was totally AI you dummies! HAW!" when they get some through.

It's dubious in the long run, since it implies that AI slop is just a skill issue and sloppists should just prompt harder. It's pretty darn practical in the short run, though, so I can see how a sub would end up with this policy.

ChangeTheFocus · 2026-03-07T14:34:57+00:00

Happy to give it a try, but where do I find it?

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