I'm interested in the style guide point about using non-gendered pronouns for LLMs - if I were to write a style guide, I would say, "use the gender appropriate for the persona designed by the company," for example Siri-the-llm would be "she" but ChatGPT or Sydney would be "it," a male persona llm would be "he," an explicitly nonbinary one would be "they," etc. Respect the company's style guide etc.
But I can see the potential for harm in over-humanizing by a news outlet. I'd be interested to hear what their decision-making process was for this point, if it was obvious or if they went back and forth, what arguments they had for which direction, etc.
The core problem surrounding LLMs is personification. Narratives that surround LLMs have failed to draw a clear distinction between what they hope to be, and what they are.
An LLM hopes to be an "intelligence" that can understand and manipulate text along the logical boundaries of language; and do so intentionally.
What an LLM really is, is an inference model that can reorganize text across boundaries that closely "align to" real language patterns. This is accomplished by creating a completely new pattern (the model) from inferring whatever patterns already exist in the training corpus' text.
A Large Language Model (LLM) serves as an alternative to true language comprehension. It is not an equivalent replacement, nor does it intelligently navigate itself with any explicit intent.
The act of "intelligently navigating the content of language" is at the core of journalism. It's incredibly important for journalist to both recognize and articulate the difference between an Artificial Intelligence realized, and any technology in the category of AI pursuit.
Really? I would have said the opposite - journalists have no obligation to parrot what companies' marketing departments feed them, and in fact usually ought to do the opposite.
Russia might name its invasion of Ukraine "Anti-Nazi Operation Freedom Eagle" but you wouldn't expect a war correspondent to repeat such obvious propaganda. In general, journalists have no obligation to follow companies' and governments' naming preferences.
Well, that's true, but for example if the branding guide says to call Reddit with a lowercase r (reddit) then you do that. If they then change it and now want "Reddit" then you do this, too.
Or LEGO gets written in all caps.
To me, the style guide decision to conform to the desired persona when describing it is along these lines.
But I can see the potential for harm in over-humanizing by a news outlet. I'd be interested to hear what their decision-making process was for this point, if it was obvious or if they went back and forth, what arguments they had for which direction, etc.