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TECHNOLOGY & CULTURE
Sorry, Your Accent Doesn’t Fit the Algorithm
Linguistic imperialism in the age of machine-polished communication
No one makes mistakes anymore, because of AI.
This realization hit me as I was glancing through an article written by someone whom I recently had a coffee with. Their spoken English is their own, flavoured with a tinge of their mother tongue accent, and a few others they’ve accumulated along the way from a life scattered abroad.
Their article didn’t sound like them at all. There was no accent. No hybrid musicality in the tone, idiosyncratic expressions, varied sentence structure, or flow. There was only perfectly correct and predictable English.
I was horrified.
Not that they chose to use AI, but that they had willingly shed their personality to appear more interesting, when in fact, the opposite effect resulted from their foray into technology.
It’s almost its own form of white-washing or English-washing if you will. Call it what you want, the idea is one of erasure and streamlining our nuances to fit something neat. Something mainstream.
I am not critical of people from different cultures who use AI to perfect their English. I can understand why…
