Did you know Researchers Call Out AI Colonialism in Writing Tools, Warning of Subtle Bias and Cultural Erasure

 

According to a new study from Cornell University, many people use AI for writing and use some AI writing tools like GPT-4o to autocomplete or Gmail's suggestions, which can unintentionally change their writing styles. The study says that Hindi/Urdu speaking users said that when they used AI writing tools, their writing started to look more Western or American. The vocabulary, sentence structure, and even the cultural expressions in those writings were generic and too Western. For the study, the researchers gathered 118 people from the US and India for writing tasks and asked some to use AI suggestions and the others not to use them. It was found that AI tools for writing were more helpful to American users, while most of the cultural details of Indians were lost in the writing.

The researchers say that there are hidden cultural biases in AI writings, and most of them favor Western styles. When Indians used AI tools for writing, their writing tone became American. Some of the examples were AI suggesting foods like sushi and pizza first instead of writing about what Indian people eat, and also always suggesting Christmas as a festival. This shows that these types of suggestions push people towards Western culture references, and most of the time, it doesn't even happen in a loud way.

The study also found that there are inequalities between people when it comes to AI usage, with Americans saying that they write 30% faster with AI’s help, while Indians said that they don't benefit much from AI suggestions. The researchers also trained an AI model to tell the differences between American and Indian writing, but even though it was accurate in 90% of the human-only writing, it was less accurate in AI-assisted writing. Much of the cultural richness in Indian writings was lost because of AI, and researchers named it AI colonialism and warned that this can lead to cognitive imperialism.