Agreed. I edited my comment to add what I think would be a reasonable way to handle it. "he/she" is just silly for humans to say, but is seems appropriate when the text is coming from a machine and there is uncertainty.
Makes it hard to paste though. Then again, so does an error in gender.
But, I don't think he/she is viable because a major use case is people pasting quickly on their phones. You can see this because the app has automatic clipboard copy built in.
Singular they seems to be the general approach that people are moving towards. It's now accepted in AP style under some circumstances--the some circumstances being basically if you can't figure out a way to cleanly write around it. And AP style is one of the stylebooks a lot of organizations look to for their own house styles.
He/she has always been pretty awkward and silly. But in the eyes of at least some people, it also has the failing that even after all that it still assumes binary genders.
In the context of this thread, I thought: if I don't want the machine to presume male or female, than what do I want it to do? he/she was what I came up with, but this does not address non-binary gender or fluid gender, weaknesses which were on my mind.
Curious, I looked for guidelines and the best I could come up with was this, which seems helpful if you know the person in question, but not so much if you're referring to someone completely unknown: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-person_pronoun#Transgend...
Singular "they" has a long history of being used as a generic pronoun, before a bunch of white men decided in the 18th century to try and prescribe "he." Singular "they" is making a comeback, though, and in this case it would be appropriate.
