I've spent much of my life dealing with written and spoken words. Now I'm a technologist making use of natural language processing for human good. Given that I work in artificial intelligence（AI）, I'm realizing something dangerous happening. Machines are ruining the way we communicate.
AI voices are normalized and yet cold, no matter which accent（口音）you set your Siri or Amazon Alexa into. It's difficult to normalize language to be inoffensive because sometimes we do make people feel uncomfortable or even make them annoyed. Yet this is exactly what we're asking artificial intelligence to do for us on a billion-person scale. Once these rules are carried out by machines, they're unavoidable and create much bigger issues.
We notice that there is an active desire to only include standardized language in AI-powered tools in an attempt to avoid including potentially hateful or offensive language. And these AI-powered tools are exactly what we use to complete our thoughts almost at any given time. They are everywhere—in our emails, word processors, and web pages. The machines are pushing us into a common tongue, and we accept it as a matter of convenience. But what's the cost? We're trading uniqueness and accuracy for convenience. We're also handing the power of acceptable speech to machines not people.
In the real world, people don't communicate like a Wikipedia（维基百科） article. We use tone（语气）, humor and facial expressions. We can tell where peoplewere bon based on their accents and wording. Humans are truly unique, and our communication is constantly changing. So we should demand AI systems that promote individuality and uniqueness. We should demand to know how AI is developed and the data used to build it. Because we all deserve this.
