Artificial Intelligence, Colonial Legacy, and the Unequal Economics of Expression

There is an inequality in the world of writing that rarely announces itself as inequality. Some people are born into the language through which much of the world conducts its intellectual and professional affairs. Others must spend years, sometimes decades, acquiring that language before their ideas can travel beyond their immediate communities. The first group inherits an advantage. The second must overcome a disadvantage it did not choose. Neither circumstance tells us anything about their intellectual abilities. Yet this distinction has long influenced whose arguments are heard, whose scholarship circulates, whose books are published, and whose voices acquire authority.

Artificial intelligence has begun to challenge this arrangement. But it has also introduced a complication: the same technology that helps an intellectually capable person overcome barriers to expression can enable another to appear more knowledgeable than they are. This is the paradox at the center of the emerging relationship between artificial intelligence and intellectual life.

The Language That Empire Left Behind

Nobody chooses a mother tongue. We inherit our first language through family, community, and everyday experience. Those born into English-speaking environments acquire its conventions through ordinary participation in life. Others may spend years learning English after acquiring two or three other languages. By the time they enter the same intellectual conversation, they have traveled vastly different linguistic distances. But this inequality has a history.

English did not acquire its international authority because of inherent linguistic superiority. Its position emerged through historical distributions of political, economic, and institutional power. British colonial expansion established English within administrative, educational, and legal institutions across substantial parts of Africa and Asia. In many colonized societies, proficiency in English became associated with government employment, higher education, professional advancement, and social mobility.

Colonialism influenced not only political authority but also the institutions through which knowledge was recognized and rewarded. Formal independence did not necessarily dismantle these arrangements. English remained influential in many postcolonial societies, sometimes because it served practical purposes in multilingual environments. American economic influence, scientific publishing, international commerce, and digital technology subsequently reinforced its global position.

The language itself is not the adversary here. English has enabled extraordinary intellectual exchanges across national and cultural boundaries. The inequality lies in the historical circumstances that made proficiency in one language a disproportionately powerful condition for intellectual participation.

When Fluency Masquerades as Intelligence

Consider two scholars presenting arguments of comparable intellectual depth. One writes in elegant, idiomatic English. The other possesses equally sophisticated knowledge but struggles with syntax, unfamiliar expressions, or the conventions of English academic prose. Readers may find the first argument more persuasive even when its reasoning is no stronger. We sometimes mistake fluency for intelligence and awkward expression for intellectual inadequacy.

Language and thought are not entirely separable. Writing can clarify an argument, expose contradictions, and generate insights. Nevertheless, developing an original interpretation and expressing it elegantly in English are distinguishable accomplishments. For multilingual writers, these achievements have too often been treated as inseparable. Artificial intelligence now challenges that assumption.

Imagine a scholar who has spent decades studying political institutions, historical memory, or displacement. English is the scholar’s fourth or fifth language. Producing a publishable essay requires substantial additional labor, not because the argument lacks substance, but because communicating it demands linguistic refinement. AI can help clarify sentences, identify ambiguities, organize material, and make the argument accessible to a wider readership. Has the scholar surrendered intellectual independence? Not necessarily. The ideas may remain the scholar’s own. The evidence still requires verification. The conclusions still belong to the person prepared to defend them.

What has changed is the cost of communicating those ideas. The machine has not necessarily made that individual more intelligent. It has helped make an existing intelligence more accessible – this is monumental distinction that must be kept in mind.

The Thoughts That Never Reached the Page

Filmon Woldai’s recent reflection on AI-assisted writing introduces another dimension to this question. He describes an intellectual life in which ideas frequently emerged through observation, reading, and reflection but never reached written form. Ordinary obligations intervened. Arguments developed mentally, only to disappear before they could be recorded.

AI, combined with voice transcription, has changed that relationship. Thoughts can now be captured while they remain alive, examined, organized, and developed into readable essays. His experience raises a question that extends beyond linguistic proficiency: how much intellectual life has remained invisible because people lacked the time, resources, confidence, or practical means to articulate it?

The ability to produce writing has never depended solely on the ability to think. It has also depended on material circumstances. For multilingual writers, these constraints can accumulate. A person must find time to develop an argument, then additional time to communicate it in a language acquired later in life. AI may reduce both burdens. But Filmon also recognizes an important complication. Organizing an argument can alter its meaning. A machine may introduce distinctions, change emphasis, or suggest conclusions the writer had not previously considered.

We cannot simply assume that all intellectual work precedes technological assistance. The question becomes what the writer does with those contributions. Does the writer examine them, challenge them, and accept responsibility for the resulting argument? Or does the writer adopt impressive formulations without understanding what they mean? That distinction matters more than whether a machine participated in producing the sentences. 

The Economics of Linguistic Privilege

Language is not merely a means of communication. It is also an economic resource. For many native English speakers, command of the language has provided opportunities in journalism, editing, publishing, education, and other professions where linguistic proficiency carries market value. Professional writing requires discipline, imagination, and judgment. Native English speakers are not uniformly prosperous, and their accomplishments should not be reduced to inherited advantages.

Nevertheless, possessing a globally influential language from childhood can provide opportunities that others must invest considerable resources to access. Then a technology arrives that enables someone writing in a  fourth or fifth language to produce English prose of comparable surface quality. Part of the established advantage becomes less exclusive. For some professionals, AI threatens the economic value of skills cultivated over many years. For others, it reduces a barrier that previously limited participation.

What appears to one group as the erosion of professional security may appear to another as the opening of an intellectual marketplace. This does not mean opposition to AI is simply a defense of privilege. Concerns about authenticity, copyright, employment, and intellectual dependence are genuine. Still, economic interests and ethical convictions can coexist. The previous distribution of opportunities was never linguistically neutral. Any serious discussion of AI and writing must acknowledge that history.

When Expression Becomes Intellectual Disguise

But there is another side to the transformation. Filmon introduces the expression AI catfishing to describe the deliberate use of artificial intelligence to create a misleading impression of one’s intellectual abilities or contributions. The distinction is important. A person may use AI to communicate knowledge acquired through years of study. Another may request a sophisticated essay on a subject they barely understand and publish it in a manner that encourages readers to mistake the machine’s performance for their own intellectual achievement. The resulting essays might appear equally impressive. Yet the relationship between the writer and the argument is fundamentally different.

Filmon makes a particularly useful distinction between the intellectual value of a text and the intellectual credibility of its apparent author. An AI-generated essay may contain valuable ideas regardless of how it was produced. But when readers begin treating its publisher as an authority, the person’s understanding and contribution become relevant.

This is not an argument for demanding that writers document every stage of composition. Nor is it a justification for treating all AI-assisted writing as intellectually suspect. It is a reminder that polished expression cannot, by itself, establish intellectual competence. Interestingly, that is precisely the assumption linguistic privilege has long encouraged.

Before AI, fluency could cause readers to overestimate a writer’s intellectual abilities while linguistic awkwardness could lead them to underestimate another’s. AI complicates both judgments. It can reveal intellectual depth previously obscured by linguistic limitations. It can also manufacture the appearance of intellectual depth where little exists.

The problem is therefore not simply distinguishing human writing from machine writing. It is learning to distinguish the quality of an argument from the intellectual authority we attribute to the person presenting it.

Access Without Erasure

Greater linguistic accessibility does not automatically produce intellectual equality. AI systems may reproduce the cultural assumptions and linguistic conventions of the institutions that develop them. They can make prose smoother while removing unfamiliar metaphors, inherited expressions, and ways of understanding experience that do not conform to standardized English.

A multilingual writer might gain access to international audiences while gradually surrendering the distinctiveness of their own voice. That would be a troubling exchange. The objective should not be to make every writer sound alike. It should be to make different voices intelligible without making their differences disappear.

Nor should technological assistance relieve writers of intellectual responsibility. A writer who uses AI to examine an argument must still understand its assumptions, verify its evidence, and remain prepared to defend or revise its conclusions. Intellectual independence need not mean intellectual solitude. But assistance becomes substitution when the writer ceases to exercise meaningful judgment.

Who Gets to Participate, and on What Terms?

The debate over artificial intelligence often asks whether machines will diminish creativity or undermine the dignity of intellectual labor. Those questions matter. But they remain incomplete unless we also ask whose creativity has historically struggled to find an audience and whose intellectual labor has carried an additional linguistic burden.

The colonial and postcolonial history of English reminds us that international intellectual participation has never occurred on entirely equal linguistic terms. Filmon’s intervention reminds us of something equally important: the ability to produce sophisticated prose is no longer reliable evidence that its apparent author possesses the intellectual abilities the prose seems to demonstrate. These observations are not contradictory. They describe two consequences of the same technological transformation.

AI can make an existing intelligence more visible. It can also make an absent or limited intellectual contribution appear more substantial than it is. Our task is not to condemn the technology for creating this ambiguity, nor to celebrate it as though it had abolished historical inequality. It is to develop more demanding standards of intellectual judgment while welcoming the possibility of wider participation.

We should ask whether an argument is coherent, whether its evidence is sound, whether its author understands what is being claimed, and whether the contribution being presented is honestly represented. We should also ask whether linguistic conventions continue to exclude capable thinkers whose ideas deserve consideration.

Artificial intelligence will not undo colonial history or eliminate the economic hierarchies of global publishing. But it may weaken one of their persistent consequences: the expectation that those born outside dominant linguistic communities must first overcome an additional barrier before their intellectual contributions can receive a fair hearing. And perhaps that is the larger opportunity before us.

The machine has not given multilingual writers their thoughts. It may simply have helped remove a barrier between those thoughts and the world. What remains our responsibility is to distinguish the removal of that barrier from the manufacture of an intellectual identity that has not been earned.

Reference: 

Filmon W. 2026:  https://prometheuswoldai.substack.com/p/ai-catfishing