AI systems are built on English – but not the kind most of the world speaks

By Celeste Rodriguez Louro, Associate professor, Chair of Linguistics and Director of Language Lab, The University of Western Australia

An estimated 90% of the training data for current generative AI systems stems from English. However, English is an international lingua franca with about 1.5 billion speakers worldwide, and countless varieties.

So whose English is today’s technology based on? The answer is primarily the English of mainstream America.

This is no accident. Mainstream American English is entrenched in the digital…

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