[Linganth] Fwd: Ling Anth & LLMs Reading Group - Zion Mengesha & Sharese King - June 15 - "Synthetic Selves"

[Anna Weichselbraun]

Dear Language Machines Network,

We are very excited to have Zion Mengesha (UCLA) and Sharese King (Chicago) join us on June 15, 2026 for our last session of the academic year to present their draft conference presentation "Synthetic Selves: Race, Gender, Sexuality and the Language of AI Personas" from 18h-20h CEST (Paris/Vienna time).

Here's the abstract:
In 2023, Meta released AI “personas”, user-generated large language model (LLM)-powered chatbots that carry humanlike conversations with users of its social media platforms. The proliferation of LLM-powered chatbots has led to the creation of hundreds of thousands of unique personae that millions of users interact with on a daily basis (Westfall 2025), ranging from celebrity characters like Paris Hilton and Snoop Dogg (Handman 2025) to occupational characters such as Black History Professor and Indian Nutritionist. Recent research has begun to show that anthropomorphism, or the tendency to ascribe human-like traits to chatbots (Epley et al. 2007; Waytz et al 2010), leads to higher rates of trust (Cohn et al 2024). Increased trust also increases opportunities for real harm, such as the spread of misinformation, misdiagnoses, and even suicide. However, little work has explored anthropomorphism from a sociolinguistic perspective. Using data from conversations with 25 African American AI personas and 25 white AI personas, balanced for gender, we examine patterns of variation in how differently racialized and gendered personas use features of African American Language (Rickford 1999), masculinized (Kiesling 2007) and feminized language (Lakoff 1973). We find that overall personae mirror raciolinguistic ideologies about African American speakers and gendered language ideologies about white speakers. Such results raise questions about how the parody of social types through linguistic variation reifies existing racialized and gendered stereotypes. 

Please RSVP by filling out this form <https://forms.gle/HtWKSHUH8oNggYGG7> to receive the Zoom link and a PDF of a recent article Sharese King co-authored in Nature which we have found very inspiring! We've streamlined our system so that you will receive an automatic response upon registering.

We’ll be starting up again in September and have some open slots. So please do write to us if you’d like to share a work in progress with the group. We are also continuing to accept submissions to the Special Issue in JLA! We hope to see some of you at the AI & Sociolinguistics Conference in Copenhagen in August or at 4S in Toronto in October. Siri and I will also be presenting at an AI and Knowledge Conference in Tübingen in September! 

We look forward to seeing you!

Siri and Anna


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