# My LLM might Mimic AAE -- But When Should it?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.04564 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2502.04564/

## Key facts

- Cited by 1 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 7 of its 40 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Feb 2025.

## Builds on (most cited first, 7 of 7)

- [Language Models are Few-Shot Learners](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.14165/) (2020)
- [Chatbot Arena: An Open Platform for Evaluating LLMs by Human Preference](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.04132/) (2024)
- [Demographic Dialectal Variation in Social Media: A Case Study of African-American English](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1608.08868/) (2016)
- [Dialect prejudice predicts AI decisions about people's character, employability, and criminality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.00742/) (2024)
- [Interview: A Large-Scale Open-Source Corpus of Media Dialog](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03090/) (2020)
- [Disambiguation of morpho-syntactic features of African American English -- the case of habitual be](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2204.12421/) (2022)
- [Creating an African American-Sounding TTS: Guidelines, Technical Challenges,and Surprising Evaluations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.11209/) (2024)

## Built on by (most cited first, 1 of 1)

- [Social Perceptions of English Spelling Variation on Twitter: A Comparative Analysis of Human and LLM Responses](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23041/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We examine the representation of African American English (AAE) in large language models (LLMs), exploring (a) the perceptions Black Americans have of how effective these technologies are at producing authentic AAE, and (b) in what contexts Black Americans find this desirable. Through both a survey of Black Americans (n= 104) and annotation of LLM-produced AAE by Black Americans (n= 228), we find that Black Americans favor choice and autonomy in determining when AAE is appropriate in LLM output. They tend to prefer that LLMs default to communicating in Mainstream U.S. English in formal settings, with greater interest in AAE production in less formal settings. When LLMs were appropriately prompted and provided in context examples, our participants found their outputs to have a level of AAE authenticity on par with transcripts of Black American speech. Select code and data for our project can be found here: https://github.com/smelliecat/AAEMime.git