This was done with my co-author Jeffrey Basoah; collaborators @taolongg.bsky.social, @katharinareinecke.bsky.social, @kaitlynzhou.bsky.social, and @blahtino.bsky.social; and my advisors @chryssazrv.bsky.social and @maartensap.bsky.social at @ltiatcmu.bsky.social and @istecnico.bsky.social!

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And here are some examples where users enjoyed the interaction with the sociolectal LLMs:

😊 “It just sounds more fun to interact with” -AAE participant

💅 “I enjoy being called a diva!” -Queer slang participant

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Lastly we asked users for justifications for their LLM preference. Here are a few comments about the sociolect LLMs:

🚫“Agent [AAELM] using AAE sounds like a joke and not natural.” -AAE participant

🚫“Even people who use LGBTQ slang don’t talk like that constantly...” -Queer slang participant

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We also were curious into seeing how each of the user perceptions impacted user reliance on LLMs. For this we observed that generally, perception variables were positively associated with reliance. 😄

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We also observed user perceptions: trust, social proximity, satisfaction, frustration, and explicit preference for an LLM using sociolects.

Notably, we notice how AAE participants explicitly preferred the SAELM over the AAELM, whereas this wasn’t the case for Queer slang participants. 💙💚

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In our study we find that AAE users rely more on the SAE LLM over AAELM, while for Queer slang users there is no difference between the SAE LLM and QSLM.

This shows that for some sociolects, users will rely more on an LLM in Standard English than one in a sociolect they use themselves. 🤎🩷

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We run two parallel studies:

1: with AAE speakers using AAE LLM (AAELM) 👋🏾
2: with Queer slang speakers using Queer slang LLM (QSLM) 🏳️‍🌈

In each, participants watched videos and were offered to use either a Standard English LLM or AAELM/QSLM to help answer questions.

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Our study (n=985) looks at how AAVE speakers and Queer slang speakers perceive and rely on LLMs’ use of their sociolect (i.e., a dialect centered around a social class). 🗣️

This answers our main research question:

“How do users behave and feel when engaging with a sociolectal LLM?” 🤷🏻🤷🏾‍♀️🤷🏽‍♂️

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