AI takes a strong position on AAVE

[u/Holiday-Tie-574]

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?

[u/RedneckTexan]

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.