Is it Legitimate for AI Language Generators To Use Personal Pronouns?

Jim Mason
1 min readNov 21, 2023

We humans have experiences that they do not

Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on Unsplash

I have just published a piece titled “Our Fascinating Senses of Touch” here on Medium. If a similar piece were to be written by one of the text-generating large language programs, would it be legitimate for the word “Our” to appear in the title or in the text?

To me it’s obvious that it would not be. Anything written by such a program that purports to report sensory, emotional, or cognitive experiences that the program does not itself have would be deceptive.

I would go further to say that anything that such a program wrote using first-person pronouns (“I”, “me”, “my”, “we”, “us”, “our”) that dealt with human attributes or ideas would also be deceptive, because it would likely mislead human readers into thinking that the piece was written by another human.

So if we humans want to find ways to regulate such AI programs, I suggest that we attempt to ban their use of first-person pronouns unless the programs are describing their own attributes.

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Jim Mason

I study language, cognition, and humans as social animals. You can support me by joining Medium at https://jmason37-80878.medium.com/membership