My senior year at Penn I was very active in an on-campus Christian fellowship and had the pleasure of getting to know a lot of incoming freshman who expressed interested in getting involved. Penn being Penn, and the faith community being the faith community, it was an incredibly multi-national group. I recall befriending a young man from Hong Kong, who seemed eternally sunny, sometimes comically so like when he told me he liked a hit song on the radio because it had a good beat and a hook that included a phrase he associated as positive, never mind that the song was not so covertly sexual in nature.
Not long into the school year, our friendship had deepened enough that he came to me one day, his usually chipper disposition replaced with a more beaten down countenance. He confided in me that some of his floor mates had been condescending towards him because of his accent. It grated on him that he was being taken less seriously because his English didn't sound as pure as that of native speakers. I could feel the hurt in his voice when he said, "I'm not stupid."
America is a wonderful place, including and especially its diversity. Nowhere else do people from vastly different parts of the world and stations in life come together, regularly and easily and powerfully. And yet, our dominance in the world comes with it a huge blind spot when it comes to the English language that is our mother tongue and only tongue, that we can quite easily and meanly look down on others whose English isn't as smooth as ours. Never mind that it is incredibly intelligent and brave for people like my friend to hack it in a country far from home in a language that is not their primary language.
Just to bring us to the present, my friend ended up doing just fine at Penn, double-majoring and getting good grades, and has had an extremely impressive career in business since then. I'd say he's not stupid! But, despite the social progress we've made from the mid-1990s to today, I still feel like non-native speakers are written off as less than, because of their thick accents or difficult with American slang.
This article puts an interesting twist to this point, which is that what people dismiss as "AI slop" sometimes is AI slop but sometimes is a non-native English speaker trying desperately to convert their thoughts into content in a language that is not their primary language. I've noticed that any sort of discourse about AI ends up being, like much of contemporary dialogue, charged with the divisiveness of taking and assuming extreme positions, in the case of AI that either it is the salvation of humanity (and therefore everything about it is good) or else its utter downfall (and therefore everything about it is bad).
I don't think it's an insultingly moderate position to say that there are pros and cons to AI, but it seems patently obvious that that is the case. Which means that, yes, people use AI in lazy or nefarious ways, which yields "slop" which we should see through and be negative about. But, detecting AI-speak can also be an indication that someone is trying their best to communicate in a language that is hard for them so they are leaning on some extra help to do so.
Perhaps this nuance is harder to parse than, say, someone who is speaking unintelligibly versus someone who is quite intelligent but struggling to speak in English. But it's worth looking for the difference, so that we are not falsely accusing someone of slop who simply needs extra help to convey their point. It would not be kind to automatically conflate the two, so I know I will try harder myself to not jump to that conclusion.
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