While Artificial Intelligence (AI) now has the ability to produce perfect Malay-English sentences, it still can’t grasp the essential meaning of “jom” beyond the English translation of “let’s go.” For context, think about your social media feed on August 31: Merdeka salutations and chic, promotional corporate videos by local brands dominate feeds. Now transpose this dynamic on a national scale.

Tourism Malaysia received backlash from the citizenry on Wednesday evening for releasing its fully AI-Generated Citrawarna 2026 promo video – by that same evening, local netizens were flocking to the comments section of the Tourism Malaysia website calling the visualizations “uncanny”, “soulless” and “detached from true culture”. An obvious and undeniable message: sterilize our nation’s cultural narrative and your citizens will know. Just to illustrate this point, imagine two Merdeka messages sitting together on your smartphone screen.

Here’s the first: “As we commemorate the sovereignty of our nation, let us synergize our efforts to uphold peace, diversity and multicultural harmony.” It is slick, grammatically perfect, perhaps crafted in nine seconds, as a stressed marketing executive punched a utilitarian command and waited.

Below this is a scrolling, presumably the latest missive from your favourite local coffee shop: “Selamat Hari Merdeka, fam! Nasi lemak bungkus is selling out fast today. Jom singgah before the parade starts. Keep that muhibbah spirit strong, and drive safely if you’re heading back to your kampung!

Here, you have the familiar expertise of a seasoned communicator, intuitively reaching for the right local colloquialism, or knowing when ‘merdeka’ requires a ‘muhibbah’ for emphasis. Both statements are perfect. Both will be understood. But like the ill-fated promotional video, only one of these statements possesses the soul to give your Millennial parents a second pause.

One feels composed for us; the other feels composed at us. As technology increasingly writes our speeches and campaigns with breathtaking speed, who, exactly, is left writing Malaysia? We didn’t require an app to do our bidding long before today’s corporate AI boom. For decades, before the tech world recognized multilingualism as an app feature rather than a complex social phenomenon, Malaysia has been a tapestry of linguistic interplay.

Malaysians glide seamlessly between Bahasa Melayu, English, Mandarin, Tamil, and a dozen regional dialects, sometimes in the same sentence, sometimes even in the same word. For this reason alone, none of us needed to be taught by an app how to meld three languages into a single thought; many of us discovered such linguistic architecture on the school playground. This phenomenon, linguists call it “translanguaging”, is nothing more than our fluid, purposeful movement between languages to fully make meaning. Research shows translanguaging is an essential aspect of learning, a mechanism that students and teachers use to both manage classroom discourse and form meaningful relationships.

Even outside the classroom, it helps shape the bonds and identity that tie us together in a shared community. With technology increasingly permeating every aspect of life, summarising texts, polishing grammar, generating bilingual reports, composing headlines and public statements, the conversation in Malaysia has already been set to mirror trends observed globally. This year, it received a strong impulse from the National AI Roadmap 2021-2025, followed up last September by the guidelines for AI Governance and Ethics, and this December by the establishment of the National AI Office.

Accordingly, the question in Malaysia today is not whether machines can write but whose voices will be silently edited out in the process. But what truly defines communication is going beyond the strict confines of grammar and imbuing it with a cultural context; shared experience; and the delicate social nuances and engagements: humour, politeness, awareness of the recipient. None of these can be possibly deciphered by a standard grammar checker. Just imagine the chasm between a grammar-correct, culture-blind, language-deaf translator and human speech. A machine can render ‘How are you?’ into perfect Malay, but in a real-life conversation on the street in Malaysia, you would be sure to hear ‘Dah makan?’ (Have you eaten?)

For algorithms, this question refers to a purely biological query on whether or not you have eaten something. For culture, this question is a supremely caring offer of humanity. True proficiency teaching further extends this notion: any practical educator will prepare his or her students so that they modify both the usage of the language and the structure of the information conveyed, catering to both the algorithms and yet still to human recipients. There is not meant to be an agenda to demonise the use of technology, nor to depict a sense of perpetual war: machines are a useful tool that can tirelessly draft for professional and student users, and can provide that gap in between, this increasing multilingual landscape.

Students at university working on papers until two in the morning can have AI as an overnight companion, which could provide support for equality of opportunity and linguistic assistance, as rural students like them could gain as much writing help as those in the city.

The hidden drawback is the danger in their formulaic, predictable patterns and monotonous stylistic resemblance, their ability to rob us of our rich regional accents, cultural flavours and individuality. Global leaders such as the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) highlight that issue as a threat to cultural integrity and push for policies that would strengthen it instead of undermine it. Imagine an army of companies, though with slightly different company names, each producing an identical output.

Though one could be with logos of different brands, one hundred submissions could only bear one single voice. This risk became apparent in April with the Jalur Gemilang crisis. Malaysian newsrooms, companies, and even official documents from the Ministry of Education portrayed our flag in such a way that the Islamic crescent was absent.

A mainstream media outlet that published our flag without the Islamic crescent on its front page immediately received public backlash, suspension, thirteen police reports, and a warning from the Prime Minister’s Office; technology does not replace human judgment. To be best, this is a humbling reminder that machines trained on global texts and algorithms are unlikely to recognize our symbols of national identity, despite explicit prompt commands.

Worst of all, this showed our own human culpability: failing to fact-check AI outputs. These had already occurred in various fields, from an eye-popping International Nurse Day 2024 poster to the ditching of the Tourism Malaysia video. If a machine cannot draw a country’s flag, it does not truly know that the country exists, let alone understand its soul.

By Nurnadirah Shahira binti Nazri, Academic Executive, Centre of Degree and Foundation Studies, SPACE UTM