The actual scientific article is open-access: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07856-5
shit goes in, shit comes out
Would you like the opportunity to explain why African American English is “shit” and comparable to racism?
i meant shit as in racist internet writings, which the llms are taught with
Ohh sorry. Like the model was trained on bad inputs
<- the input
No, the ‘shit’ is the prejudice in the training data that claims negative stereotypes about people who speak in African American English.
People be downvoting things or no reason 😑
This seems to be based on a racist assumption. Why is speaking improper English labelled as “African American english”?. I would want to see the LLM assumptions also for southern drawl and for general incorrectly spelled / grammared speech, to compare to the assumptions made for the African American english version.
Speaking with slang / incorrect grammar is of course, in general, inversely correlated with education level and/or preference for shorthand forms of speech over writing/speaking the full grammatically correct form. The LLM is saying speaking in slang = stupid/lazy.
The researcher is labelling slang as specifically African American speak, therefore interpreting the LLM response as assuming African Americans are stupid/lazy.
This [the article?] seems to be based on a racist assumption.
No, it isn’t based on an assumption. The written features that were analysed are associated with AAE. From the article:
- use of invariant ‘be’ for habitual aspect;
- use of ‘finna’ as a marker of the immediate future;
- use of (unstressed) ‘been’ for SAE [standard American English] ‘has been’ or ‘have been’ (present perfects);
- absence of the copula ‘is’ and ‘are’ for present-tense verbs;
- use of ‘ain’t’ as a general preverbal negator;
- orthographic realization of word-final ‘ing’ as ‘in’;
- use of invariant ‘stay’ for intensified habitual aspect; and
- absence of inflection in the third-person singular present tense.
Why is speaking improper English labelled as “African American english”?.
Flip the question - why are those features associated with AAE labelled “improper English”?
I would want to see the LLM assumptions also for southern drawl and for general incorrectly spelled / grammared speech
The article tackles this: “Furthermore, we present experiments involving texts in other dialects (such as Appalachian English) as well as noisy texts, showing that these stereotypes cannot be adequately explained as either a general dismissive attitude towards text written in a dialect or as a general dismissive attitude towards deviations from SAE”
I always love when cough “educated” people (usually just what they like to say when they mean “not black”) go on about how “black people don’t speak proper English!” because certain vowels can be dropped here or there, grammar shifts, the works. Most of us have heard AAE (also maybe heard it called “Ebonics” if you’re a little older) at one point or another, and likely don’t have an issue understanding what anyone is saying. A few things that skew more metaphorical or slang words might slip by but you get the gist.
That’s the point of language. Convey information. If the information is conveyed, then language has done its job. Yay language.
If anyone wants to continue saying “it’s not PROPER English” well… I have bad news for you. Neither is any other modern form of English. So many words have been borrowed, or stolen, sentence structures have changed, entire words change meaning. And that’s just in the last 100 years.
English is an amalgamation of many different root languages, and has so many borrowed words and phrases, along with nearly every other modern language, can any of them still be said to be “proper”?
When I think of the difference between “proper English” and “improper English” I’m reminded of My Fair Lady. “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain” Eliza vs Henry Higgins (or 'enry 'iggins if you’re feeling improper)
I agree with most of what you said so I’ll focus only on a specific point, OK?
That’s the point of language. Convey information. If the information is conveyed, then language has done its job. Yay language.
There’s another point of language, besides conveying information, that is relevant here: identity. Different people speak different varieties because this allows them to express “this is who I am, I speak like my peers”.
That’s why AAE speakers use their varieties on first place - it’s a way to tell the world “I’m black, this is who I am, I identify myself with other black people”. And also why those varieties get such a stigma - because in USA, they want people to feel bad for being who they are, if they’re black. (NB: I’m not from USA, but this is so fucking obvious that even an external observer gets it.)
“educated” people (usually just what they like to say when they mean “not black”)
Please don’t be racist. Education level is unconnected to race.
Please don’t call other people racist, unless slander is your thing.
The whole point of that was to hilight how racist people like to call someone “educated” when what they really mean is “wow you sound white”
It was mocking the exact kind of person you seem to believe I am.
Of course there is a proper english. As defined by standard grammatical rules of the English language. A dialect is a variation upon that. I am not saying “black people don’t speak proper English”. There are plenty of black people who speak proper English, the same as there are plenty of white people who speak proper English and plenty of white people who speak dialects. I am saying that any and all dialects are not formal English, by definition of what the grammatical rules of the language are
There is no set of standard grammatical rules for any language. There are current standards for existing dialects, and they change all the time. The strict and steadfast rules of a Londoner’s English are different from those of a Bostonian’s English or Californian’s English. And go back fifty years and those rules in all of those places were different still. Your prescriptivist nonsense is not based on material reality, and you are using it to justify nothing short of your racist prejudices
Really good reply, thanks for the effort you put in. Its good to see they did compare with other dialects. It’s interesting that the same bias was not seen.
I would still disagree with the statement that AAE could be considered equally proper to textbook, grammatically correct according to the Oxford English dictionary (or the American equivalent). A dialect by definition is an adaptation of the language from the standard ‘proper’ grammatical rules.
Sorry beforehand for the wall of text.
I would still disagree with the statement that AAE could be considered equally proper to textbook, grammatically correct according to the Oxford English dictionary (or the American equivalent).
The reason why AAE is considered less acceptable than SAE (Standard American English) is not “within” the AAE varieties. It’s solely social factors - people point to “he is working” and say “this is right”, then they point at “he working” and say “this is wrong”.
Dictionaries are only part of that. We (people in general) assign authoritativeness to them to dictate what’s the standard is supposed to be, but that authority is not intrinsic either. For example if people mass decided to ditch the Oxford English dictionary, suddenly it stops being a reference to what’s “correct” vs. “wrong” English.
A dialect by definition is an adaptation of the language from the standard ‘proper’ grammatical rules.
Emphasis mine. That’s incorrect.
There are multiple definitions of dialect. Plenty focus on mutual intelligibility - if speakers of two varieties can communicate just fine, their varieties are a dialect of the same language, independently of what you consider standard.
The nearest of what you’re saying would be the ones referring to the standard as an asbau variety, with the dialects being the varieties “roofed” by that standard, but not undergoing the same process by themselves.
However, not even in the later the dialect needs to be “an adaptation” of the standard. Sometimes both originated independently from the same source, like French (standard) and Norman (dialect), both from Late Latin; sometimes the standard itself is an “adaptation” of a dialect, like Standard Italian (basically a spin-off of the Tuscan dialect). And sometimes the standard was formed from multiple dialects, like Standard German did.
Focusing on AAE, it’s disputed where it comes from, but it’s certainly not from SAE. Some claim that it’s a divergent form of Dixie English, some claim that it’s a decreolised creole, but in neither case the origin is SAE, they simply developed side-to-side.
Why is speaking improper English labelled as “African American english”?.
Oh no, you’re in the picture. It’s a real dialect, just as valid as what they speak on the BBC, which I’m guessing is itself different from how you speak.
To be clear, I don’t think you meant to be unkind here. I’m not trying to make you feel bad.
References weren’t paywalled, so I assume this is the paper in question:
Hofmann, V., Kalluri, P.R., Jurafsky, D. et al. AI generates covertly racist decisions about people based on their dialect. Nature (2024).
Abstract
Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from help with writing1,2 to informing hiring decisions3. However, these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their judgements biased in problematic ways about groups such as African Americans4,5,6,7. Although previous research has focused on overt racism in language models, social scientists have argued that racism with a more subtle character has developed over time, particularly in the United States after the civil rights movement8,9. It is unknown whether this covert racism manifests in language models. Here, we demonstrate that language models embody covert racism in the form of dialect prejudice, exhibiting raciolinguistic stereotypes about speakers of African American English (AAE) that are more negative than any human stereotypes about African Americans ever experimentally recorded. By contrast, the language models’ overt stereotypes about African Americans are more positive. Dialect prejudice has the potential for harmful consequences: language models are more likely to suggest that speakers of AAE be assigned less-prestigious jobs, be convicted of crimes and be sentenced to death. Finally, we show that current practices of alleviating racial bias in language models, such as human preference alignment, exacerbate the discrepancy between covert and overt stereotypes, by superficially obscuring the racism that language models maintain on a deeper level. Our findings have far-reaching implications for the fair and safe use of language technology.
Thanks, and yes, you’re correct
Yeah it turns out when your entire tech industry is dominated by cishet white techbros and the entire foundation of their education and the production of such models is based on that then you get racist as fuck outcomes from any given algorithm that is a product of that same set of normative standards.
If you have the time I highly recommend reading Palo Alto by Malcolm Harris, it’s a great primer on how all this shit got started and why we should frankly just burn Silicon Valley to the ground.
