Underestimating something that has an AI “accent” by reflexively dismissing it as slop rhymes curiously with underestimating someone because they have a funny accent in your native language (and it isn’t one of the accents that you think signals superiority, like the BBC British accent for English).

This is particularly true of native English speakers, who often act like any sign of non-native oral fluency is a symptom of some kind of mental deficiency or an infantile disposition. Native speakers of other languages tend to be more used to multi-lingual environments and communicating across language boundaries (and appropriately ignoring things like accents).

I mean, seriously, a text might parse as 100% AI and full of “structural” and “load-bearing” type tics and contain a random deep insight born of connecting dots no human would think to connect. You’re really going to let a shallow aesthetic reaction stop you cold? And yes, there’s the grifty types of slop, but there the problem is detecting crappy human intentions, which is a different, much easier filtration problem.

And in a weirdly condescending move that converges the two prejudices into one mega-prejudice, some anti-AI types are like “I’m fine with AI use for special cases like ESL.”

This is a peculiarly humanities type blindspot, and also peculiarly American. You crash and burn really fast in stem domains if you make the mistake of judging people by their mastery of your cute little parochial subculture’s particular peculiarities of inflection and idiom.

My own accent got sufficiently neutralized after a few years in the US that I’ve never felt underestimated because of it. But early on in the US, once I realized this bias existed, I realized it was also an unfair advantage you could arbitrage. Ignoring accents is one of the easiest hacks for finding under-rated talent in the US. This includes domestic accents btw, like rural southern drawls etc. It’s a bit like that principle of blind music auditions for orchestras.

GenAI language isn’t an accent per se, but an “accent” is more than just characteristic vocal inflections. It’s also sentence structure (things like question tags should be part of accent, no?), word choices (like “delve” being an African bias), and of course idiomatic usages and cultural references.

Form and structure are just one end of a smooth spectrum with semantics at the other end. And in general, people tend to attribute to disfluency (from which they infer things like comprehension problems or stupidity) features of speech and writing that don’t really affect ability to comprehend or communicate at all.

Interestingly, this phenomenon is related to legibility/authoritarian high modernism. People who haven’t wandered past the boundaries of their subcultures much tend to do make that same authoritarian legibilizing move. Seeing like a subculture.