# person (x-person.net)

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
- Says: "I need to talk to a person."
  Means: 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."
- Says: "That person was rude."
  Means: 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."
- Says: "Add a new person to the list."
  Means: 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."
- Says: "Every person deserves privacy."
  Means: 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.