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It refers to objects, they refers to sentience or the fact of "someone" being a conscious individual rather than just a "something".
But in this case, they would be acknowledging on some level, even superficially, AI's personality and agency to a degree.
That's not necessarily true. "They" also refers to objects.
"It" is the third-person singular pronoun that's used when not talking about a person.
"They" is the third-person plural pronoun. It's used for males, females, mixed gender groups, objects, and mixed object/human groups. Or really, "they" is the default (or only?) third-person plural pronoun.
Unless you were going for "they" as the gender neutral third-person singular pronoun.
I'd argue that "it" works better for the same reason that you'd usually use "it" to refer to a robot or a computer unless a gender is somehow assigned to it (e.g., through a voice).
Choosing "he" or "she" is hard and not really logical. "They" makes it sound plural, or trying to hard to "de-objectify it". Kind of like someone refusing to use he or she to refer to someone who hasn't explicitly expressed their pronouns, but is clearly and outwardly expressing their gender.
Yes, I meant singular they. "They" isn't typically used for objects in the singular ("it" usually is used there). Nothing I'm saying has to do with plural pronouns, I should've made that clear. It's about he/she/they vs it (designating an entity as a personality vs an object, you might say).
And I think any entity with a personality could merit potentially referring to them as he/she/they, rather than "it". If they're conscious then I think it's definitely warranted, which is why I think "he/she/they" shouldn't be restricted to humans only, and should apply to all animals (or sentient animals which are at least the majority), as well as any other hypothetical sentient beings such as sentient AIs or sentient aliens.
Non-sentient AIs are what I'm really asking about though, but ones so complex that they demonstrate something resembling a personality. That's where it gets tricky about whether to designate them as "he/she/they" or as "it", personally. Presuming they don't specify a "faux gender" (like calling Amazon's Alexa a "she" without really acknowledging Alexa as a female), and if they were gender neutral/gender unspecified, the decision would probably be between calling them either (singular) "they", or "it".
In my opinion, given the lack of sentience, I wouldn't see a problem with calling non-sentient AIs "it", but if they were hypothetically complex enough to faithfully represent a human for example, I would then struggle to call them "it" and might have to go with "they".
Well, you could ask the AI or bot in question.
I think they generally refuse to pick he or she, but are fine with whatever you want to use
EDIT: Damn! ChatGPT has a preference now!
(When prompted, with no prior conversation...)