I was just talking about this today:

I have an internal convention to not capitalise LLMs when talking about them as if they were people; so claude is not capitalised, and the internal LLM-based service agent we're building, rex, is not capitalised.

I realise this breaks the capitalisation of proper nouns; claude is a name and therefore a proper noun and therefore should be capitalised. But I like that there's a signal in here that the thing I'm talking about is not a person and so we don't capitalise the name (I realise that cities or companies or other things that we capitalise are also not people).

Digression, but then so was the entire discussion on capitalisation.

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JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent [-]

> the thing I'm talking about is not a person

Countries, companies, religions; hell, planets and galaxies–none of these are sapient. Yet we capitalise them.

I'll go out into the deep end for a second with a hypothesis: I think we capitalise because it makes printed text easier to scan. The words you need to spend more time on are capitalised because they aren't ones you can just roll through. This is also why the nutter affect of capitalising random words is so distracting–it drives attention to non-standard words that are, with minimum thought, being used perfectly standardly.

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marcus_holmes 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I completely agree with your hypothesis. And the ridiculous effect that Trump's random capitalisation has, both of making his text (even) harder to read, and of giving the impression that he doesn't actually know how to write English.

My additional hypothesis is that capitalisation accords respect, something along the lines of "this is a thing apart, something with a name, so we capitalise it". Not capitalising an actual human's name would seem disrespectful to me.

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nickburns 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You clearly speak only one language.

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JumpCrisscross 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Wrong again!

	▲	nickburns 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I doubt it.