“Spoiler: AI is Not Going Anywhere”
I use AI for basically everything short of brushing my teeth. As a researcher, educator, writer, and everyday human just trying to function, it’s my co-pilot for brainstorming research ideas, debugging my cursed R code, proofreading manuscripts, and shrinking 40-page articles into something I can actually read before bedtime. It moonlights as my social media intern, graphic designer, travel agent, recipe wizard, and occasional life coach (seriously, it once saved me from a vinegar crisis). It also helps me practice Finnish, Norwegian, and Korean grammar–languages I’m currently crushing on hard (heart eyes). And when all else fails, it’s my personal stand-up comic, churning out puns and dumb jokes on demand. AI supercharges my efficiency and creativity, but let’s be real: it’s the messy, cultural, human perspective that makes the whole thing actually mean something.
AI supercharges my efficiency and creativity, but let’s be real: it’s the messy, cultural, human perspective that makes the whole thing actually mean something.
AI prepares us for our "IRL" interactions
I’m an applied sociolinguist who cut my teeth in the wild west of early-2000s chatrooms, so I’m basically living my best life now that I can use AI as my multilingual BFF. I love that I can practice a target language at 3 a.m. without judgment (and unlike AIM back in 2002, the bot actually teaches me something useful), while also designing prompts and activities that go way beyond vocab drills to help me experience language in context and culture. For me, AI isn’t about replacing real interactions – it’s about building bridges, making social media feel like conversation instead of broadcast, and giving me a nuanced sociolinguistic landscape so I’m more prepared (and way more fun at parties) when the IRL interactions finally happen.
AI reflects the "messy training data we feed it"
I get equal parts amused and exhausted when people argue about whether AI should exist in education, as if we still get a vote. Spoiler: it’s not going anywhere. I’d rather folks stop performing outrage and actually try the tools–see what they do well, where they flop, and how they can free up time for more meaningful work. AI is more than ChatGPT writing your student’s meh essay; it’s also rerouting you around traffic on 35W, spotting sketchy credit card charges, predicting health risks, and making sure your Uber doesn’t strand you after a Taylor Swift concert. Am I thrilled I can offload boring tasks to a bot so I can focus on creative work? Absolutely. But I’m also serious about confronting the biases AI reproduces, because they’re our biases too. The teachable moment here is crystal clear: AI reflects the messy training data we feed it. If we want it to do better, we need to diversify that data, challenge its outputs (and our own thinking), and keep humans – not machines – at the center of judgment and meaning-making.
If we want AI to do better, we need to diversify that data, challenge its outputs (and our own thinking), and keep humans – not machines – at the center of judgment and meaning-making.
AI pulls back the curtain on hidden biases
If you’ve ever wished you had a practice buddy who never gets tired, judges your grammar fails, and will talk to you in literally any language at any time of the day or night, then our recent project, PromptEd: AI Prompts for Language Learners, might be for you. Developed in collaboration with Sabrina Fluegel, a graduate student in SPPT, and supported by the CLA Language Center and the Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA), this project offers a database of ready-to-use AI prompts that help learners strengthen their language skills and cultural knowledge through scaffolded interactions with a chatbot in a second language.
AI prompts for language learners
The goal of the PromptEd: AI prompts for language educators project is to provide language educators with high-quality, copy/paste-able prompts for use with AI chatbots that allow 21st-century learners to boost their linguistic skills and intercultural competence through thoughtful and regular interaction with chatbots. The prompts have been tested for efficiency and optimized on ChatGPT 4.0 in Spanish, French, and English. We encourage users to follow the structure of the prompts in our database to revise and innovate their own, and to then join us in our open educational practices (Ehlers, 2011) by submitting their creations for inclusion in the database by sharing them back through our contributions form.
We refined and tested the prompts in English, Spanish, and French (aka the “high-resource guinea pigs”), but you can also adapt them to use them in any language that has some amount of representation in the training data. Bonus: If you already know a bit of the language, AI doesn’t just sharpen your skills – it also pulls back the curtain on hidden biases in grammar rules, “prestige” forms, and cultural assumptions. That’s a double win: better fluency and sharper thinking. Try out the prompts, remix them, and even add your own to the collection through our intake form.
AI doesn’t just sharpen your skills – it also pulls back the curtain on hidden biases in grammar rules, “prestige” forms, and cultural assumptions. That’s a double win: better fluency and sharper thinking.
As a language nerd, my favorite prompt to end each day is to ask the bot to teach me something quirky about sociolinguistic variation in a language. Last night, for instance, I learned that the Finnish /d/ in words like sydän “heart” is totally fake: it was invented for Standard Finnish, and dialects swap it out for [r], [l], [ð], or just yeet it entirely!
Meet Associate Professor Amanda Dalola
Professor Dalola is a sociolinguist who studies socially-conditioned phonetic and phonological variation in the world's languages, with a focus on varieties of French, Korean and Norwegian. She is the director of the Language Center, with a faculty appointment in the Institute of Linguistics.
Her work brings together quantitative and qualitative approaches, drawing on data from the lab, the field, curated corpora, and social media. Trained in Romance linguistics but equally at home in Scandinavian languages such as Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian, she pursues a wide-ranging research agenda. One line of her scholarship investigates how social media and open educational practices can reshape second language teaching, while another focuses on creating innovative resources for language learners. She has co-authored #OnYGo, an open educational resource for beginning French, and is now co-authoring a second OER for heritage speakers of Vietnamese. In her spare time, she enjoys studying Finnish, Korean, Norwegian, and dogs.
What role do the liberal arts play in understanding and scrutinizing artificial intelligence?
Advances in AI are social, cultural, and ethical. As these new technologies reshape industries and influence our daily lives, they also raise important questions about the relationship between people and technology. That's why we need the liberal arts. The liberal arts provide the context to grapple with these questions through a humanity-centered perspective.
