Recently, I met with a founder who cringed when his colleague used the word “humans” instead of “users.” He wasn’t sure why.

Yeah because it sounds super weird. Who says “humans” instead of “people”.

• “my app has 2000 users” - yes
• "2000 people use my app" - yes
• "2000 humans use my app" - you’re definitely an alien

Either way what a stupid article. The AI angle pretty much makes me dismiss it outright because I refuse to let AI dictate anything I do except for adding AI crawlers to my website’s robots.txt. And then you’ve got the corporate focus which is also really strange since that’s not the only place where there’s “users”. Open-source software also has users (and developers, so if you want to replace “users” with “people”, does that mean developers are not people?) and I would be insulted if someone implied I “depersonalize” the people who use my software by calling them users. It’s just a descriptive word and this article and everyone quoted here seems like they’re trying to pull a bad connotation to the word out of thin air.