It's not weird if it comes from ESL. At least in portuguese there's no "it" equivalent for pronouns or any other neutral artifact in the language, in other words, everything has a gender, even an AI model, the same goes for objects e.g.: knife(she), fork(he), spoon(she), plate(he).

People often commit mistakes regarding that, the same way we don't have "they" as pronoun to someone we don't know the gender, so we address to these people as "dele(dela)" (masculine and feminine pronouns).

But if this is coming from someone who has english as a primary language it's definetely weird to treat models as person

Weird. Don’t you have an equivalent to the Spanish “eso, esa”? Gendered object.

It’s funny with someone coming from Mandarin. There’s no separate he/she/it in spoken Mandarin, so they tend to mix up “he” and “she.” It sounds very strange and gives me some idea of what French speakers must go through when they hear me say “le voiture” or whatever.