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LLMs have a strong bias against use of African American English (arstechnica.com)

submitted 2 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/technology

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 2 weeks ago (6 children)

Warning: I've edited the comment that you're replying to. I'm saying this for the sake of transparency, as you're clearly quoting the earlier version.

The key here is that AAVE is not written, but AAE is. That "V" is for vernacular, it excludes written English by definition.

Now, I'm not sure if those white kids are using AAE or simply borrowing things from AAE into their written English. I simply don't have data on that.

There’s been bleed over for centuries, but with the Internet and social media it’s merging faster, which is common for dialects of people that interact frequently

Varieties merging or splitting is rarely the result of just more contact between people; it's all about identity. If things are happening as you described them, it's simply that those white kids stopped seeing black people as "the others", to see them as "part of the same group as us".

[–] givesomefucks -2 points 2 weeks ago (5 children)

That “V” is for vernacular, it excludes written English by definition.

Yeah. But most people "write" online like they speak...

https://commonwealthtimes.org/2021/02/18/aave-is-not-your-internet-slang-it-is-black-culture/

If people followed rules about language, yeah, vernacular would just be spoken speech. But that's not how it works. The rules are made to reflect what people are doing. The rules don't control what people do.

So yes, while the word vernacular commonly meant only spoken words, there ain't nothing stopping nobody from typing like they speak.

And people been doing it for a long time

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago (4 children)

Yeah. But most people “write” online like they speak…

That's a common misconception.

While your written and spoken varieties do interact a fair bit, no, people don't "write like they speak". Not even online.

And that is not simply an "ackshyually". A lot of AAVE features simply don't transpose into writing - like prosody, non-rhoticity, /ɪ/-breaking, /äɪ/-monophtongisation... at most you can consciously approximate them into writing, but they won't be there.

If people followed rules about language, yeah, vernacular would just be spoken speech. But that’s not how it works. The rules are made to reflect what people are doing.

That is not about people following/not following "rules", it's about nomenclature - it's exactly the reason why "AAE" and "AAVE" are necessary as separated terms.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

More and more people are using speech to text. And it does show how differently people speak than write (apparently I never say my be in because, for example).

But it also means that llms aren't only being fed text, but also speech converted into text.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago

For me it's like "holy fuck... do I eat so fucking many vowels???" It reaches a point that I eventually gave up using text-to-speech with Portuguese in my cell phone, I go straight for Italian because at least then it gets me right.

But it also means that llms aren’t only being fed text, but also speech converted into text.

That might be part of the issue causing the bias shown in the article.

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