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Hello to you all members I am new to this forum. The question I have relate to writing about characters that are not humans but Artificial Intelligence and robots. I my real life I am working in these fields as a programmer but I have started to write fictions involving AI, robots and other non human characters. In the present project, the principal characters are an artificial intelligence that is forced to locate into the brain of a robot to drive it to save the world. All along the story I have used the "it", "its" for lifeless entities that are the AI and the robot. However along the story, it makes the style kinda strange and sometimes not coherent depending of situations. My question is as the AI and the robot are acting and behaving like humans, would it be acceptable to refer to them as humans like he and his etc.. I have not sexualized the AI or the robot, but when interacting with humans, I need to be able to differentiate them. Some thoughts on that question will be appreciated.
Or if you want to live in reality... he, him, his are the traditional (and correct) gender-neutral pronouns.
Rolls grenade and slowly walks away...
They/them has been used as singular pronouns for 600 years. It's only recently the anti-woke has taken issue with them. But yeah, he/him/his works too.
If we are suppose to like this robot, I'd choose any pronoun to be honest, to give them a human quality. If we are not supposed to like this robot, I'd stick with it/its/itself as it comes across as non-human and cold.
Thanks for your reply. I like the concept of ; If I like the character I use he/she/him etc.. and otherwise if I want to express dislike I use the it and related.. Thanks makes sense.
Since you state that you have not assigned genders to the AI entities, As such, I would avoid he and she for clarity sake.
Instead I would give them labels or identifiers (e.g., AI ONE, MODEL 236, etc, or non-human type names - e.g., ESSENCE, SENTINAL, etc, etc. and use that to refer to them.
And if you are referring to a collection of them - THEY or THEM is perfectly fine since THEY or THEM are gender neutral .
And IMO - should you decide later to assign them genders - He or She is perfectly fine. For example, if I was writing EX MACHINA, I would refer to the entity is she.