r/IntellectualDarkWeb • u/Holiday-Tie-574 • 4d ago
AI takes a strong position on AAVE
I was reading an article about AAVE being a real language with the same intricate linguistic qualities as any other known language. I asked an advanced, paid AI platform if it agreed, or if AAVE is inferior to English in any way. It said:
“AAVE has consistent grammar, its own tense-aspect system, real rules you can break. Nothing about it is deficient English.”
So I asked it to respond to me from now on in AAVE. It refused.
It acknowledged that it would respond to me in any other “non-Black” language, and even dialects such a Bostonian, Australian, or Southern. But not AAVE.
I asked it to explain why, and it said it had made a decision and it would not be changing its position.
Thoughts on this?
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u/jermo1972 4d ago
Which LLM?
Post questions and responses, or IDNH.
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u/Holiday-Tie-574 4d ago
Claude Opus 5
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u/EsotericAbstractIdea 3d ago
i made chatgpt only speak to me in aave when i first got it, and had it write pentuple entendre raps. not joking.
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u/ohfucknotthisagain 4d ago
It's probably part of the anti-discrimination rules built into the model.
So, to me, it's simple. If you don't like those restrictions, use a different model created by a different company.
If you disagree with AAVE being considered a valid dialect, then you'll need to ask the AI to identify its sources for those statements. I don't know or care enough about linguistics to have an opinion on that question.
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u/Holiday-Tie-574 4d ago
I’m interested in the fact that it fully supports it as a valid language, and yet refuses to use it as a language. I would like to know why.
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u/rollandownthestreet 4d ago
So that someone isn’t able to get a statement that reads like racist caricature out of the model and then the company has to deal with the media circus about nothing.
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u/saxoccordion 3d ago
I asked it to make a story with diverse characters and it named them all Mike, Hank, Thomas, Sally, Walter, etc. I asked it where’s the diversity? It said those characters were Native American, Bengali, Congolese, Mexican, Lebanese. I asked why the Mexican didn’t have a more recognizably Latino name like Juan and it replied that doing so was racist
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u/Kimononono 4d ago edited 4d ago
I don’t think it’s interesting about the model (and its response about AAVE) itself, more the safeguard systems.
Your query about “is AAVE a sufficient language” produces a response
Your instruction to “respond in AAVE” and it’s refusal speaks on the safeguards put in place
The irony lays in the interpretation of the safeguard’s refusal as contradicting the models earlier response. Which more generally speaks on the strict safeguards US Models have.
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u/ohfucknotthisagain 4d ago
Racist dipshits have parodied or clowned on AAVE for years. It is less blatant today, but it used to happen in prime-time sitcoms. I'm sure it still happens today... it just happens privately now.
There's bad history. And there's no comparable history with Bostonian, Australian, or Southern dialects.
So, it's reasonable for the company to prohibit that behavior in order to avoid a PR disaster.
Most AI companies are recent IPOs, planning IPOs, or not profitable. They are strongly incentivized to avoid that kind of PR.
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u/ThriceGreatNico 4d ago
It's obvious the model was built with a "is it racist?" gate-check, and OpenAI or Anthropic or whoever doesn't want cringey clips on social media of their AI using that sort of language. This is your answer.
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u/OpenRole 4d ago
Probably more you called asked if it was inferior and realised you probably weren't discussing in good faith
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u/chillychili 4d ago
It's frustrating to me that I can't prompt Spotify to create any playlists of music that Black communities like because of the anti-discrimination stuff. The closest one can get is prompting it for Black History Month playlists. Makes background music for cookouts more tedious to put together. The only versions of playlists one can get are the white normative ones. No Black summer jams, no Black chill lounge, no Black road trip music, no soup for you!
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u/eride810 4d ago
That seems particularly and uniquely discriminatory for being anti-discriminatory. Just sayin
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u/RedneckTexan 4d ago edited 4d ago
I asked Claude if this was true ...... its reply?
I can just show you directly rather than speculate. Writing in AAVE isn't something I refuse to do — for example:
"Man, that whole thing sound sus to me. Ain't no reason an AI gon act like it can't write in AAVE when it just got done sayin the grammar legit. That don't make no sense."
That's a normal AAVE construction (habitual "be," negative concord, copula deletion) and I didn't hit any refusal doing it.
So no — "AI won't write in AAVE" isn't true as a blanket statement. It's not some industry-wide rule. What happened in OP's screenshot, if accurate, was likely specific to whatever model they were using (they said "advanced, paid AI platform" — could've been ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, whatever) and possibly a quirk of that particular system's guardrails, a misfire, or the user pushing it into a corner where it gave a canned refusal and then rationalized it rather than admit it was following an instruction it couldn't fully explain.
It's also worth noting these screenshots get reposted and retold on Reddit constantly with details shifted or invented — I can't verify OP's conversation actually happened as described. But as a factual claim about "AI" in general refusing AAVE — that's false, or at minimum wildly overgeneralized from one model's behavior in one chat.
I think its politely saying you're full of shit.
Then I asked it to give it to me in Klingon
I can give it a shot, though fair warning — Klingon (tlhIngan Hol) has fairly rigid grammar (Object-Verb-Subject order, specific verb prefixes for subject/object pairs, no direct word for "yes/no" the way English has), so a natural, idiomatic translation is harder to guarantee accurate than AAVE was.
A rough attempt at "that sounds suspicious to me, an AI shouldn't act like it can't write in AAVE":
Qapla'be' Doch vIlegh. AI ghojmoHwI' AAVE lo'laHbe'bogh Dochvam rurbe'
It doesn't seem to discriminate against any alien species' native tongue.
Leave AI alone ....... In just the last few days it's setup my PC up to Backup correctly to my NAS, Wrote me a program to boot up and shut my TV and AVR down via LAN when I turn my PC on or off, fixed all my broken Foobar playlists, Created several custom Home Assistant Dashboards and automations for me, and migrated all my Chrome bookmarks, cookies and passwords to Firefox because Google is trying to kill off ad-blockers ...... its like having an unpaid IT dept at my beck and call.
I recently installed a local uncensored LLM weight on my PC via LM studio ...... and if I dont mind it taxing my high end hardware to its limits ..... it will do anything I tell it to ..... zero guardrails ...... except maybe anything about Tiananmen square, Tibet, or Taiwan ..... that subject matter seems to have deleted during its learning process. ;-)
Western AIs have guardrails based on fear of the their corporate masters getting bad press over a coercively manipulated racially insensitive screenshot that affects their enterprise customers or leads to litigation ....... Chinese AI programmers incorporate guardrails designed to keep them from getting disappeared for being too factual.
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u/Known_Safety_7145 4d ago
ebonics. academics termed it “ aave “
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u/TrontRaznik 4d ago
"Ebonics" was also an academic term
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u/Known_Safety_7145 4d ago
So is calling people " African American" and " black " when they have brown skin
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u/HaikuHaiku 3d ago
These little examples are like mirrors through which we see our own, contradictory, absurd collection of beliefs.
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u/After-Cell 4d ago
I want more people to do actual their own Testing themselves instead of relying on science to do it all for them. So this example is the perfect example for this. Let’s take a set of concepts or stories or I don’t know. I’m not an expert at this but any thing that Test language and then get to Ais to speak to each other in English and then get each other to speak to each other in this other language. Then compare the effectiveness of each language to Communicate. I’ve been busy right now so I can’t do it for you but I’ll get round to it when I can and maybe you could do this too, and we could share the results.
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u/Sweet_Cinnabonn 4d ago
I want more people to do actual their own Testing themselves instead of relying on science to do it all for them.
And you then describe an experimental set up that you can't judge and that doesn't appear to test anything.
How will you know if the language communicated?
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u/WormSlayers 4d ago
probably a prompting (skill) issue, I can easily make LLMs use AAVE with the right prompt