Is AI Forcing Us To Speak Bad English?

I've been pondering … a theory that keeps nagging at me since last year. I spoke about this idea with a few fellow writers, but only decided to put it down in writing this week.

Is British English (Traditional Chinese, or other dialects) slowly, almost imperceptibly, fading into the background, overshadowed by the ever-growing dominance of American English (Simplified Chinese) since the digital age?

And is GenAI accelerating this linguistic shift?

As a Taiwanese and British, I feel this potential loss keenly.

Since I was born, I’ve witnessed firsthand how minor dialects struggle.

Take the word for fish: ‘魚’ in Traditional Chinese is full of detail: fins, tail, the works. In Simplified, it becomes ‘鱼,’ a couple of strokes, and you’re done. You save time, but you lose the old shape, the little story in the character.

Or that ‘dragon’: ‘龍’ is a showstopper, full of loops and twists. ‘龙’ is almost abstract, as if the dragon went on a diet.

Simplified is more efficient and much easier for non-native speakers to learn, no doubt.

And the struggle feels futile. The big languages (with bigger populations) always win; they overwhelm everything else.

It was news, social media… and now GenAI.

Would British English, with all its quirks, centuries-old idioms, and the weight of Shakespeare, Churchill, and punk rock slowly fading out under the tidal wave of AI? Do you think you’d see z or s, ou or o in the spelling?

Given that 1/3 of you reading this article are Americans, you might be wondering, "Why should I care?" This is such good news to me! After all, how convenient it is if AI systems default to your linguistic norms?

Yes, but… It’s more than this. So bear with me.

For the rest of my readers, when languages get steamrolled, you lose the inside jokes, the attitude, the memories, the stuff that makes a culture tick.

Welcome to Cyberpunk 2025.

TL;DR

• 93% of AI training data is English. by Johns Hopkins University and OpenAI

• According to BAIR (UC Berkeley), British spelling is losing ground fast. AI models favor American spellings by as much as 43%.

• These models stereotype, miss the nuance, and even get condescending with British or other non-American English.

• As the UK’s influence shrinks (not that Great Britain), there’s a real risk of British English getting steamrolled by AI’s power dynamics.

• The fix? Is there a fix? In theory, more diverse data, dialect-aware models, and actually including dialect speakers in AI development.

Shall we?

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Where The English Dominance in AI Begins

Academic papers are increasingly highlighting a concerning trend… AI models are predominantly churning out content in American English.

Yes, there is a much higher chance for an AI to split out “color” rather than “colour” or “analyze” rather than “analyse”; tube rather than subway, and then you fall down the rabbit hole of “football” meaning completely different sports, “chips” that come in a bag or with fish…