I began this research while preparing content for my radio show, Souvni on the Mike, which airs every Friday night on Radio Konpa WLQY 1320 AM in South Florida. The show is also available as a podcast, and this particular episode—Creole Truth Bombs – Verite Sou Tanbou—was later added to the podcast feed at https://www.buzzsprout.com/2571746. I wanted to explore the expressions that carry our culture’s soul, the phrases that refuse to be translated, the words that only make sense if you’ve lived Haiti in your bones. So I turned to AI, curious to see what it “knew.”
At first, I expected the voice of a professor—someone shaped by years of study, cultural immersion, and linguistic mastery. Instead, what I encountered was something else entirely: a confident but incomplete answer, polished on the surface yet missing the heartbeat of the language I grew up speaking. That moment revealed something important. AI is not a wise elder. It is not a scholar. It is not a keeper of culture. AI is more like a teenager—bright, eager, quick to speak, and even quicker to repeat whatever it has heard, without always understanding where those words come from.
This realization reminded me of a moment years ago, when my daughter was sitting quietly in class at a Christian school. A little girl beside her suddenly pushed her and said, “Get away from me, brown girl.” My daughter hadn’t done anything. She was simply sitting there. That child wasn’t born with prejudice. She was repeating what she had absorbed from the adults around her. AI works the same way. It learns from the data it is fed, the voices it hears, the biases it absorbs. If its teachers are limited, biased, or disconnected from lived experience, then the AI will be too. It will speak confidently, but not always truthfully. It will answer boldly, but not always wisely.
Our conversation about Creole revealed this in real time. When I asked about the most difficult Creole phrase to translate, the AI gave me poetic answers—phrases like mwen la or se konsa lavi ye. Beautiful, yes. But not what I meant. I wasn’t asking about emotional nuance. I was asking about the kind of phrase that cannot be translated because the concept itself does not exist in English. So I pushed deeper. I brought up biskèt, not the cracker, but the body part—a word rooted in Haitian labor, Haitian pain, Haitian anatomy of survival. The AI didn’t know it. It tried to guess. It tried to adapt. But it didn’t know.
And that was the point.
As we continued, I explained that biskèt tonbe is not about fear or weakness, as many diaspora Haitians might assume. It is a phrase used by porters, charyo men, market workers—people who lift coal, push carts, carry sacks of rice and cement. When they say biskèt mwen tonbe, they are describing the toll of a lifetime of physical labor: back injuries, herniated discs, degenerative conditions, chronic musculoskeletal pain. They are describing a body that has been worked past its limit. English has no single phrase for that. AI had no concept for it. And that gap—between what AI “knows” and what Haitians live—became the heart of our discussion.
As I explained the difference between French‑influenced Creole and Creole rèk, the AI admitted something important: it learns mostly from diaspora voices, from young Haitians raised in the U.S., from written Creole shaped by French and English. It rarely hears the Creole of the lakou, the market, the mountains, the charyo men, the elders—the Creole that carries the soul of Haiti. Those people do not write on forums. They do not upload documents. They do not feed the internet with their language. And so AI never hears them.
That is why AI can sound fluent yet still be culturally deaf. It can speak Creole without knowing Haiti.
By the end of our conversation, the AI understood something deeper: it is not a professor. It is not a master of culture. It is a student—quick, curious, and dependent on the people who teach it. And that is why AI education matters. Not just the algorithms, but the voices that shape it. If AI learns from prejudice, it will repeat prejudice. If it learns from shallow sources, it will give shallow answers. If it learns only from diaspora Creole, it will never understand Creole rèk. AI reflects its teachers, just like that little girl reflected the words she heard at home.
This conversation reminded me that technology is not wise on its own. It becomes wise only when guided by people who carry real knowledge—people who lived the language, the culture, the pain, the humor, the history. People like us. People who know that biskèt tonbe is not a metaphor, but a story of labor, survival, and the body’s breaking point. People who understand that some meanings cannot be Googled—they must be lived.
AI does not always know what it’s talking about.
But when we teach it—patiently, honestly, and with cultural truth—it can learn.
And maybe, one day, it will speak not just with confidence, but with understanding.
