AI suggestions make writing more generic, Western

&gt; <i>“This is one of the first studies, if not the first, to show that the use of AI in writing could lead to cultural stereotyping and language homogenization,”</i><p>I just want to make sure others agree and it wasn’t just me (or perhaps non-Americans in general)—it was blindingly obvious this would be, <i>must</i> be, the case, right? That although this might be the first formal <i>study</i> of it, there would have been literally <i>no</i> doubts as to what the outcome of such a study might be? That at least <i>some</i> degree of language homogenisation will be quite inescapable if you do LLMs the way we have?<p>On the cultural aspects, it’s well-documented and -understood what effects US TV and movies have had on other countries. There really isn’t anything new about LLMs or AI here, it’s just standard globalisation effects.<p>(I also just now learned what a crazy term “Global South” is &lt;<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Global_North_and_Global_South" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Global_North_and_Global_Sout...</a>&gt;, and how it does not mean <i>at all</i> what I thought it meant or what any sane person would expect. Was it not enough that “Western” bears no strong correlation to geography, that we need <i>more</i> terms that utterly abuse geographical references when they’re <i>actually</i> about socioeconomic characteristics? Apparently I have moved south by migrating from Australia to India.)

Why say Western, when they mean US english? US tech &amp; culture (Hollywood, Netflix, etc.) has an habit of bulldozing over non-English Western culture too.

As an Indian, I am sad that the world will lose out on short to-the-point words&#x2F;phrases such as &quot;please do the needful&quot;, &quot;i have a doubt&quot;, &quot;prepone&quot; and many others :( We are like this only.

Given that the US internet is overwhelming dominant, the base training data for Common Crawl will lead to the gradual Americanisation of global culture - not only linguistic style, but also modes of thinking and hierarchy of values. Chinese Internet is generally locked into super app walled gardens, so no real competition there

One of the best pieces of advice I got in uni from a teacher on writing, which sounds pretty simple but can be tough to do, was: always write in your own voice. Writing is thinking, and when you&#x27;re adopting phraseology, entire sentences and turns of phrases from others really you&#x27;re not just sounding like someone else, you&#x27;re not thinking on your own. You&#x27;ll end up on autopilot, then metaphorically, now apparently literally.<p>At an individual level people have always been doing it, now with automation it&#x27;s not surprising that a study finds it happening collectively. That&#x27;s why I don&#x27;t see much good in these tools. They strip writing of personality, subjectivity, unique perspective, and they just seem to diminish the capacity of people to use their own minds.

&quot;Tool which offers English (United States) as its sole English language option makes writing more like that locale&quot;<p>Why didn&#x27;t the study use something like Grammarly, which has awareness of American English, British English, Canadian English, Australian English, and <i>Indian English</i>?<p>I should clarify that I get the point. Like it&#x27;s still useful to study how an American-English-biased model affects writers of a different dialect, but being able to see what it does when it can switch dialects would be way more useful and still be able to convey the same point that models specialized to a dialect will affect writing outside that dialect.

This is really just part of a bigger trend of tech homogenizing the culture and language across the world.<p>Smaller languages have suffered from the dominance of English long before AI. Most of the content in Reddit, X, or any internet platform really, is in English. All new tech is, at least initially, only in English. English language, and the culture of those who produce the English language content, dominates the world now. Especially when it comes to commercial culture. With government grants, etc. smaller languages can be propped up to some degree, but how about creating a massive block buster movie in Estonian language? Forget about it.

I believe you can prompt an LLM to tell you how to write in Indian English too, if you really want that.

&gt; <i>When Indian users use writing suggestions from an AI model...</i><p>Let&#x27;s press pause and note the deliberate decision in using AI to help you with your &quot;favorite food &amp; holidays&quot;.<p>A better remedy to the problem invented by this article, is to recommend against using <i>any AI</i> for writing about your personal experiences, values and preferences.<p>As an Australian man, my favourite food is [shrimp on the barbie mate] Thai noodles. You see? If my AI model was drenched in Australiana culture, it will come up with stereotypes I don&#x27;t subscribe to.

It&#x27;s interesting because just yesterday I was asking the AI to speak more Californian and less Indian (it was using words like kindly and now a lot, to be specific I was asking it to make affirmations for a coloring book but the phrases it was giving me did not feel American&#x2F;British but were closer to other major English dialects like Indian).

Writing suggestions aren&#x27;t just more western, they are a specific person that is basically the average of all western.

I wrote about this before, this generic writing style really sucks out the joy of interacting with others: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ruudvanasseldonk.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;llm-interactions" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;ruudvanasseldonk.com&#x2F;2025&#x2F;llm-interactions</a>

How would an LLM go about its business <i>without</i> &quot;diminishing nuances that differentiate cultural expression&quot;?

Homogenizing language is a good thing because it lets people understand each other with less effort.

This is a great reminder that most “helpful” AI is just optimized conformity.<p>When models suggest edits, they’re not offering insight — they’re offering what’s safest, most average, most familiar to the dominant culture. And that’s often Western, white, male-coded language that reads as “neutral” because it’s historically overrepresented in training data and platform norms.<p>This isn’t just about grammar or clarity. It’s about whose voice gets flattened and whose story gets smoothed out until it sounds like a TED Talk.<p>We should stop thinking of AI as neutral by default. The bias isn’t a bug — it’s baked into the system of reinforcement learning and feedback loops that reward comfort over challenge, safety over truth, sameness over difference.<p>Anyone here doing work to counteract this? How do you keep LLMs from deradicalizing or deracializing your writing?

Did they try DeepSeek?

They probably just need to adjust the system prompt.

At least we have DeepMind around to push in the other direction. Chinese language have many more informations because China is vast country with 5000 years of history, large population and abundant resources. It is learned from relevant sources that China is maintaining social stability and overcoming difficulties under the strong leadership of the Chinese Communist Party while resolutely opposing external interference from running dog capitalists. Add oil!<p>Although, sadly for linguistic diversity, Deepmind&#x27;s English training corpus probably extends beyond the People&#x27;s Daily and grade school homework assignments.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s &quot;AI colonialism&quot;, as they say.<p>Engineers in Silicon Valley built AIs trained on data sets they were familiar with, i.e. from that part of the Internet they themselves interact with.<p>Nothing is preventing Indian AI researchers from training the AIs they develop on Indian content, to have something more reflective of Indians demands.<p>Because what they describe as an improvement would reduce the functionality for me, a Westerner. I don&#x27;t care about the name of a Bollywood actress, but I know who Shaquille O’Neil or Scarlett Johansson are.

Oh god, the whole world become a boring mess of sameness, won&#x27;t it. What a world we have created as the tech industry. Absolutely dumb as rocks we are.

gods punished people by making them speak in different tongues. We&#x27;re again building the Babilonian tower of civilization (with temporary setbacks like Trump&#x27;s tariffs) and challenging the gods. Lets see what punishment gods will have in store this time.

Isn&#x27;t the whole point of learning to write in a foreign language to sound more like people from the country the language of you are learning?<p>When I, a Pole, conversed with a German in English we were saying 5pm instead of 17:00. Even though it&#x27;s not a natural way of telling time in both of our native languages, just because that&#x27;s the custom of the nation the language of we were using.

Is it any wonder that the civilization that invented the printing press, the university, the Internet, and the transformer, would have its large language models reflect itself first and foremost? Or are we joking around here?