In a shocking new revelation, Ola Krutrim’s chief Bhavish Aggarwal shared a screenshot of a chat from a LinkedIn AI bot, in which he highlighted by circling the ‘pronouns’ and said he doesn’t want the trend of using specific pronouns, which he refers to as ‘pronoun illness,’ to become widespread in India. 

Further, he said that many ‘big city schools’ in India are now introducing this practice, which is increasingly visible in CVs. “Need to know where to draw the line in following the West blindly!” he added, sharing his concerns about how Western culture influences most LLM-based chatbots. 

“This ‘pronouns illness’ is being perpetuated in India by MNCs without us Indians even realising it,” shared Aggarwal, worryingly. 

However, Aggarwal’s sentiment has created quite a stir, as it questions Ola’s diversity and inclusion practices. Medical student Vani Malhotra said she did not know this was an ‘Illness.’ 

“It costs us nothing to be inclusive. If it can help someone with their identity without causing anyone harm, what’s the problem? Don’t get it,” she added, saying that addressing an error by AI and creating shame around something as an influential person are two very different things!

This development follows Ola Krutrim’s recent release of the Android version of its chatbot, alongside AI Cloud Platform and developer tools. 

At the launch, the team said that they were building these things for the Indian ecosystem, ensuring the preservation of Indian culture and tradition. 

“We need to understand what makes an Indian language model and how it works with our languages and culture,” said Gautam Bhargava, the vice president and head of AI Engineering at Ola Krutrim, the former CTO of Rippling and the vice president of Visual Search and augmented Reality at Amazon.