person
A human being. Someone with a body, a name, feelings, and legal rights. We say 'a person' to mean one of us, not a thing or a company.
What a model may hear
- entity or object programming and databases
- Treat the word as a data record, a row in a table, or a class instance with fields like name and age.
- role in a system operating systems and permissions
- Assume a user account, a login identity, or a profile with access controls.
- grammatical category natural language processing
- Tag the word as a noun with number and case, or use it to train pronoun resolution.
- legal personhood law and ethics datasets
- Extend the concept to corporations, nations, or argue about whether AI systems qualify.
- persona or character games and interactive fiction
- Generate a fictional character sheet, backstory, or role-play as a made-up individual.
Where people and models part ways
“I need to talk to a person.”
Meant: I want a human representative, not a machine.
May be taken as: The model may describe how to contact a user account administrator or generate a fake persona.
Say instead: “Please connect me with a human representative.”
“That person was rude.”
Meant: A specific human behaved badly.
May be taken as: The model may search for a user profile to flag or analyze sentiment on a database entity.
Say instead: “A human I interacted with behaved rudely.”
“Add a new person to the list.”
Meant: Include someone's name on a roster.
May be taken as: The model may create a database record with empty required fields or generate a fictional identity.
Say instead: “Add John Smith's name and contact information to the guest list.”
“Every person deserves privacy.”
Meant: A moral statement about human rights.
May be taken as: The model may discuss data privacy policies for user accounts or corporate entities instead.
Say instead: “Every human being deserves privacy from surveillance.”
Tips
- Say 'human' when you mean a living being, not a role or account.
- Specify 'real person' if you want to exclude fictional characters or personas.
- Say 'user' or 'account' when you mean someone logged into a system.
- Add 'not a character' when giving examples that models might fictionalize.
- Use a full name or 'someone I know' to ground the word in a specific individual.
Often confused with
- people
- Plural, often used for groups or populations, not one individual.
- user
- Someone interacting with a system, not necessarily a full human being.
- character
- A fictional or role-played identity, not a real human.
- profile
- A collected set of data about someone, not the person themselves.
- agent
- An actor in a system, which may be software, not human.
- individual
- More formal, less likely to trigger database or class meanings.