How should linguistic research inform the growing use of AI technologies that alter speech? Our faculty members Molly Babel and Amanda Cardoso recently weighed in on a new “accent masking” artificial intelligence tool in The Conversation.
Babel and Cardoso raise that the tool reproduces linguistic discrimination around accents, otherwise known as linguistic profiling or “accentism.”
“Everyone has an accent; unaccented speech is a myth,” they write. “An accent is simply a way of speaking that is distinctive to a specific group. If this is genuinely about comprehension, then why would it apply to some accents and not others?”
Read this important discussion here.
