Query/Pitch Letter
Publication: Slate (Tech-focused)
Hi Tony,
When I text my family, I write in a language that doesn't “officially” exist. A sentence usually starts in English, then pivots to Urdu, and lands back in English, all following unspoken grammatical rules we both understand perfectly, but never verbalize. When I paste that same sentence into a chatbot or a voice assistant, it breaks completely or struggles to identify what I’m talking about. I want to write a piece about how AI tools are built on a false assumption that people speak one language at a time, and why that's becoming a serious problem as these tools increasingly become adopted all over the world.
More than half the world's population code-switches (to some extent) daily, but LLMs are trained overwhelmingly on monolingual data. The result is that a chatbot can write anything for you in seconds but struggles at parsing a basic medical question from a Punjabi-English speaker in Lahore. I've been researching this gap directly. I'm developing CodeBoard, a platform for collecting multilingual language data that I'll be continuing as part of my PhD work this fall. I'd combine that firsthand research with interviews with NLP researchers to explain why the field has been so slow to address this and what fixing it would actually require.
The argument isn't the usual "AI is biased" framing. It's that the backend architecture itself (the training data, the benchmarks, and the evaluation metrics) encodes a monolingual worldview that excludes billions of speakers by design. I'd estimate this to be around 1,500-2,000 words. I'm a Computer Science and Creative Writing double major at DePauw University, heading to Indiana University Bloomington for a PhD in Information Science this fall. I speak four languages and code-switch daily. You can read more about stuff I’ve written and worked on at www.aahadv.com.
Do you think this would be a good fit for Slate?
Best,
Aahad Vakani.
Aahad Vakani
Writer. Researcher. Developer.
Aahad Vakani works between languages, code, and identity. He builds tools for multilingual speech, writes autofiction about diaspora and family, and reads professional wrestling as a serious art form. He recently graduated from DePauw University with a double major in Computer Science and English Writing, where he received the Roy and Anna Kennedy Prize in Creative Writing. He is now pursuing a PhD in Information Science at Indiana University Bloomington, where his research focuses on multilingualism, code-switching, and the speakers language technology tends to leave behind.