I typ lyk dis, so what. I use AI to write, so what.

I love going through Hinge profiles. My best friend would call it problematic and psychoanalyze it to be a reflection of my avoidant tendencies. But no this article is not about that (relax bestie, you are over thinking it). This is about one of the red flags I see in dating apps. Often times, I come across profiles that say you shouldn't go out with me if you typ lyk dis, I will fall for you if your grammar is good, Green flags I look out for: Using Oxford Commas properly. choosing to respond to these prompts with those responses instead of the zillion other possibilities already shows a lack of personality. But more than that it reeks of classism.

While one could defend those Hinge profiles saying that it's just a preference of liking people who uses or can use English properly, I argue that it is a broader reflection of the classist and colonial mentality that is so ingrained in our society. I grew up in a small town in Tamilnadu where English is a big aspirational language. You are automatically reverred if you can speak in English. My town is not an exception but rather on representation of the Indian society. It is not surprising that almost all the affordable private schools in India are English- medium schools even though research strongly emphasizes that children especially in their early days learn better in the language that's commonly used in their surrounding and 87% of urban low-income parents send their childrent to affordable private schools^[1]. I also went to an affordable private school that is English medium but all we spoke is Tamil inside the school since most of the students as well as the teachers were not proficient in English. So naturally when I started my undergrad, my English was terrible. I was one of the smart kids at the school and was the topper of the graduating batch. But at college, I felt like I was part of the lower rungs of the academic ladder. I was so intimidated by those CBSE kids who speaks such fluent English. Looking back I am kinda perplexed to realize how I associated English with smartness. Most of the CBSE kids struggled to speak decent Tamil but that never appeared like a shortcoming to me. Retrospectectively it's perplexing to realize how I subconsciously considered the English speakers to be superior. However I should cut some slack to my younger self of the misgiving of associating English capabilities with smartness.
I want to clarify my position here. By no means, I am proposing that one need not know good English. Given its lingua franca status, its indispensable to have good English capabilities in today's day and age. While it has so much racial and colonial baggage, it is what it is. Given that we should also acknowledge that a person's English proficiency especially in countries like India are often correlated with that socio- economic background. classism, by definition, is discriminating a person by their socio-economic status. Therefore, By extension, discriminating someone based on their English capabilities is clearly classist in nature.
Now with the wide availability of generative AI, the ability to produce "good" English has become much easier than before and the snobbiness of the people also take different manifestations. It would be fooling of me to make a blanket statement that using AI to write is completely acceptable. As someone who researches Responsible AI systems, I can at least 10 substack articles on the harms of using AI to write. But the point that I wanted to bring attention to is that there are multiple facets when it comes to writing and one important facets is the ability to convey one's thoughts clearly in words. Again, while the clarity in thought is one aspect of this, another important aspect is the ability to use language in a good way. For someone who is not a native English speaker and didn't grow up with a good English education, even if they have an excellent clarity of thought, they might not be able to communicate it well b cause of their lacking English capabilities.
This brings us to the fundamental question of what do we want to judge a person or a work on - on the clarity/quality of thought or on the ability to produce flawless English text without any external assistance. This problem is particularly pertinent in academic writing. Studies have shown how scholars from non-western Educational institutions are often at a disadvantage in the peer-review processes just because of their less sophisticated English writing compared to their western peers^[2]. When chatGPT got introduced, it appeared like this dynamic will change as the non-western scholars could use GenAI capabilities to produce sophisticated English text for publishing their research findings. Non-native English scholars finally seemed to have a levelling field in publishing in prestigious international forums as GenAI mitigated their troubles with English. However, now as people are familiarized with LLM-generated text and find it easier to recognize the LLM-generated text. The biases have started creeping in again. Even the GPT detectors are biased against non-Native English speakers than the native English speakers. A recent work have shown that the non-Western scholars face a bias in review processes based on their language usage but this time it's based on the AI-generated language^[3]. GPT Detectors consistently misclassify non-native English writing samples as AI-generated, whereas native writing samples are accurately identified. Furthermore, we demonstrate that simple prompting strategies can not only mitigate this bias but also effectively bypass GPT detectors, suggesting that GPT detectors may unintentionally penalize writers with constrained linguistic expressions

The core problem is that we tend to associate are kinds of skills with language capabilities. There is a generalization effect in play where we tend to assume that a person's English speaking abilities is directly associated with their capabilities.

Probably this all shouldn't be too surprising given our human nature of quickly jumping into judgements based on appearance and optics. I know I am guilty of it given the number of times I have sent likes to certain Hinge profiles just because of the pretty pictures (don't judge me please). Writing is no different. It is the aesthetics that always stands out before the substance. But it is important to recognize the politics of language and how we might be perpetuating certain status quos by judging people just based on their English language skills.

correlation of English speaking abilities with the socio-economic status.

Not show the classist tendencies just for the sake of civility.

When you are judging someone for their lacking English or grammar, just remember that people like me are judging you harder :)

If you are an avid dating app enthusiasts and likes to call out people, can you please post this article on those profiles