AI doesn’t erase my voice. It helps me shape it. 

 What if AI isn’t soulless, but simply misunderstood? What if it develops its own accent, not generic, but shaped by its creators and users? Our voices, marked by experience, culture, and even typos, leave traces in the tools we use. AI, trained on vast datasets and shaped by each interaction, reflects these traces back to us. Not perfectly, but often meaningfully. 

 This essay considers accents: mine, yours, and the ones that echo from language models. It’s about authorship, identity, neurodivergence, and how writing alongside machines is changing the craft and connection of expression. 

 When someone hears an unfamiliar accent, there’s often an instant of judgment although not always unkind, but instinctive. I know this intimately. Difference is mistaken for deficiency of fluency, of clarity, of ability.

 Accent is more than sound; it’s a “face” that shapes first impressions, often tied to assumptions about competence and background.

 I was born in Colombia, spent time in Australia and New Zealand, and have called Aotearoa home for over 20 years. Yet people still ask, “Where’s your accent from?” Sometimes they say in a very loud voice, “You’ve been here that long and still have a strong accent?” 

Yes, I do. I count in Spanish but can only recall my phone number in English. If I dream of Colombia, it’s in Spanish. For everyday life, I dream in English. No one in my dreams asks about my accent. 

Sometimes my personality shifts with my language. Even when I write, my accent peeks through. ADHD means my thoughts race ahead, making it hard to finish one before the next arrives. Dyslexia sometimes scrambles the order of words, letters and even numbers  as I translate ideas into text. 

The result? My drafts, whether in a document or text message, are a beautiful mess of tangents, unexpected spellings, and oddly joined ideas. But beneath the surface, there’s intent and meaning; every typo is just a pause while my brain does the hard work of translation. 

Some days, I don’t know if I’m a human being, or—in a moment of linguistic confusion—a “human bean.”  They sound the same to me. More than the sign of a brain processing multiple languages; it’s also a neurodivergent brain leaping ahead, ideas colliding and sentences sprawling. 

It’s messy, but also alive and honest, a kind of urgency that polished prose sometimes conceals.  As a speaker of English as a second language, I stopped getting overwhelmed and embarrassed by my linguistic shortfalls. I stopped chasing that kind of unkind perfection. 

I once thought that trying to sound more "Kiwi" would make me more accepted, successful, and would open more doors for me. That game of pristine sentences, absent distractions, and forced pauses didn’t fit how my mind works. It forced me to be who I am not. 

My game now is to edit my English when I can, clarify when the fog lifts, and embrace chaos when it’s all I have. The destination and connection remain the same, even if the route is unconventional. 

Accents live in language, and language lives in our tools. This is not new; technology has always been a partner in linguistic evolution. 

Languages change too. Fifteenth-century English bears little resemblance to today’s English.  American, New Zealand, and British English have each diverged in accent, cadence, and word choice. 

Words vanish; others shift meaning: “gay” once meant joyful; “silly” once meant blessed. 

Some languages fade. Others reinvent themselves on social media or in digital spaces. 

Indigenous languages like Quechua in South America, or Te Reo Māori in New Zealand, are revived and celebrated with new tools and collective energy. 

AI models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini have their own “computational accent.” You hear it in phrases like “It is worth noting,” or “As an AI language model…” These tics and structures reflect not only their training data, but also the conventions and biases of those who shaped it. 

This “AI accent” is not neutral. It reveals its history through preferred idioms, rhythms, and patterns. It is the digital equivalent of a regional twang. 

AI’s accent can be more than stylistic. Studies show that certain English dialects or speech styles are misrecognized or marginalized by synthetic voices, mirroring real-world bias in perception and performance. The tech does not float above society’s prejudices; sadly, it can amplify and echo them. 

To understand how accents are living archives, consider how family and place mold our speech. I grew up in Pasto, Colombia, where Quechua heritage lingers not in ruins, but in vocabulary. Our Spanish carries words like “achachay” (cold!) or “ñaño” (brother). For outsiders, our accent sounds different, sometimes the object of jokes. As kids we were taught to soften or hide it if we were not in our town. But that “difference” was actually a bond with the Andes, a living memory woven into language and identity. 

Living in Aotearoa, where English blends seamlessly with Māori, feels like home. Aotearoa New Zealand is a place where hybrid voices are honored (and sometimes hated too), where “kai” (food) and “whānau” (family) are everyday words. Like Quechua in Pasto, these words are not borrowed; they define belonging. 

Having an accent is sometimes perceived as being on the wrong side of the speaking spectrum. It has taken many years to understand that having an accent it’s just beautiful. 

My accent (and I am sure yours too) is a purposeful display of who we are and where we’ve been. A good friend—an English native speaker—once comforted me after I shared that I had been mocked for my Colombian accent. He told me: “Your accent is your edge, your X factor.”  

He was right!.  Having an accent emphasizes the right to sound like yourself. To be heard as you are, because language is agency, memory, and survival.

 Understanding language as the extension of lived identity, shaped by history and experience, shapes how I approach co-creating with AI. 

So what does “co-writing” mean for me? For a start, it isn’t handing over authorship to the machine. It’s a mutually responsive process. I prompt, prod, and rephrase; AI reorganizes, suggests, or sometimes surprises. Most of the time, I edit AI’s drafts; sometimes it helps me organize the tumble of ideas in my mind. In short (but in a very long process), co-writing with AI is iterative. A true back-and-forth dialogic process. 

 AI doesn’t only echo me; it can subtly influence my thinking too. Its logical structures sometimes nudge my rambling thoughts into coherent pathways I wouldn’t have found alone. If I rely too much on its patterns, perhaps my style shifts. This interplay of shaping and being shaped is both a risk and an opportunity. 

I co-write with AI not for convenience, but for collaboration. AI offers a sounding board that hardly tires; one that patiently deciphers my scattered drafts. For neurodivergent writers like me, digital tools (AI included) provide vital scaffolding: supporting focus, spelling, structure, and even confidence. 

AI co-writing is more like a partnership. It’s not about tricking readers or hiding behind technology, but about finding a new rhythm, one you build together, one that carries both your accent and the inflection of the machine. 

True AI–human collaboration is curious, humble, and open. It is not a sign of flawlessness or going it alone; it’s more about making something neither could make in isolation. 

When your language carries the Andes or the echoes of Māori, it is uniquely yours. When I co-write with AI, I bring my history and contradictions; the software brings its learned patterns and phrasing. My Māori, Quechua, or local idioms are not code-switching; they are the home where my language lives.

I don’t yearn for typewriters or old tools. I want language to grow older with me. 

AI helps me craft my thinking with a new kind of clarity, without erasing my history. Yes, my accent and my errors persist. But the clarity that emerges belongs to me. 

If one day, no one asks about my accent [whether human or digital] that day would feel like something precious had gone missing. 

And the day I no longer use AI or hide that I have co-created with AI, that, too, would be a loss.  A loss of our mutual accents and partnership.