The "G" in GIF stands for Graphic, which is pronounced with a hard G. It's Graphic Interchange Format; Not Jiraffic Interchange Format.

"Gift" is GIF's closest neighbor. NYU linguistics professor Lisa Davidson explains that "lexical neighbors" are words in your mental dictionary (lexicon) that are different from other words by one sound. "In the case of GIF, Davidson says, "it's only one sound off from "gift," so it's an exceptionally close lexical neighbor." Furthermore, every word that starts with G, then a vowel, then an F, is pronounced with a hard G, according to a GIF truther website run by Aaron Bazinet. For example: Gaffe. Gift. Guff. Guffaw.

A computer would pronounce the acronym with a hard "G." Text-to-speech software uses both phonetic dictionaries (where they look up the pronunciation of words that have been listed explicitly) and grapheme-to-phoneme rules (more general pronunciation rules that can be used to convert unknown written words or acronyms to text), says Frans Adriaans, an NYU professor who specializes in computational linguistics. Because GIF is an acronym and not a word, a computer would use its closest lexical neighbor to determine pronunciation. And as we've already indicated, that neighbor is "gift."

"As linguists, we don't have any opinions on how things should be pronounced, but rather we study why people pronounce words the way they do." Adriaans said.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.newsweek.com/100-percent-wrong-pronunciation-gif-483374%3famp=1