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Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

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Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#31

Post by prawn »

thomasfromcdnjs wrote: post #28

I'm an Australian indigenous and have been slowly working on this problem in my own way for a few years. https://github.com/australia/mobtranslate.com/ In it's current iteration the homepage is just running dictionaries through OpenAI. (my tribes dictionary fits in a 100k context window) My old ambitions can be found somewhat here -> https://github.com/australia/mobtranslate-server That being said, the OpenAI models…

I was looking to name a property recently and tried ChatGPT for suggestions on a theme of geographical features in various languages. I had it try Kaurna (Adelaide area) on a whim and was pleasantly surprised (given that Google Translate doesn't cover it, I guess) to find that it gave loads of relevant suggestions without any issue. Any that I picked to selectively check verified with Kaurna dictionaries OK.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#32

Post by bloak »

aussieguy1234 wrote: post #6
tho23i423434 wrote: post #4

I wonder how useful this really is. No doubt, it's excellent for archiving, but that's not the same as "preserving" culture. If it's not alive and kicking it's not a culture IMO. You see this happen even with texts : once things start being written down, the actual knowledge tends to get lost (see India for example). This "AI to help low-resource languages" thing is a big deal in India too, but it just feels like ano…

Once an LLM knows an indigenous language, even if the last speaker dies out, future generations will be able to learn the language and use the LLM to converse with them in that language. Learning a new language is a good use case for LLMs, not just indigenous languages, but any language. As for your comment "ree bad British man destroyed India" this sound more like politics than anything of substance.

Yes, but the LLM is roughly equivalent to lossy compression of the corpus it is trained on so why wouldn't you preserve that actual corpus so that it can be used to train some better LLM, or something better than an LLM, in the future?

(There may be a good answer to that question: perhaps, for example, the corpus can't be preserved for data protection reasons but the LLM trained on it can be preserved? For various reasons that doesn't seem very plausible, however.)

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#34

Post by crackalamoo »

bloak wrote: post #32
aussieguy1234 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once an LLM knows an indigenous language, even if the last speaker dies out, future generations will be able to learn the language and use the LLM to converse with them in that language. Learning a new language is a good use case for LLMs, not just indigenous languages, but any language. As for your comment "ree bad British man destroyed India" this sound more like politics than anything of substance.

Yes, but the LLM is roughly equivalent to lossy compression of the corpus it is trained on so why wouldn't you preserve that actual corpus so that it can be used to train some better LLM, or something better than an LLM, in the future? (There may be a good answer to that question: perhaps, for example, the corpus can't be preserved for data protection reasons but the LLM trained on it can be preserved? For various re…

You can do both. Preserving the corpus and building the LLM probably gives the best chance for future generations.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#35

Post by cess11 »

lolinder wrote: post #11
userbinator wrote: post #7

s/preserve/hallucinate/ The next few decades are going to be really, really weird.

This take us overly cynical in this case—the original and primary use case for LLMs is to model languages in a comprehensive way. It's literally in the name. Hallucinations rarely make up invalid grammar or invent non-existent words, what we're concerned about is facts, which isn't relevant at all when the goal is language preservation.

They're kind of bad at pretty much all languages, except simpler forms of english and Python. The tonality in the big LLM:s tends to be distinctly inhuman as well.

I suspect it'll be hard to find more material in some obscure, dying language than there is of either of those in the common training sets.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#36

Post by ahoef »

userbinator wrote: post #12
lolinder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take us overly cynical in this case—the original and primary use case for LLMs is to model languages in a comprehensive way. It's literally in the name. Hallucinations rarely make up invalid grammar or invent non-existent words, what we're concerned about is facts, which isn't relevant at all when the goal is language preservation.

Depending on how powerful the language modeling is, I suspect it could lead to an LLM which will confidently and convincingly tell you how to say things like "floppy disk" and "SSD" in every extinct language and even those that went extinct long before computers ever existed, which is... interesting, but not exactly truth. I've seen LLMs hallucinate nonexistent things in programming languages. It's hard to believe it…

Isn't this something humans would also do if there were native speakers left to speak the language?

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#37

Post by ahoef »

cess11 wrote: post #35
lolinder wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This take us overly cynical in this case—the original and primary use case for LLMs is to model languages in a comprehensive way. It's literally in the name. Hallucinations rarely make up invalid grammar or invent non-existent words, what we're concerned about is facts, which isn't relevant at all when the goal is language preservation.

They're kind of bad at pretty much all languages, except simpler forms of english and Python. The tonality in the big LLM:s tends to be distinctly inhuman as well. I suspect it'll be hard to find more material in some obscure, dying language than there is of either of those in the common training sets.

What language have you tried that they're bad at? I've tried a bunch of European languages and they are all perfect (or perfect enough for me to never know otherwise)

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#38

Post by romaaeterna »

"His dream is to revive dying languages..."

The content of modern culture is too much for dying or ancient languages, and what you actually get is English/modern thoughtspace expressed in the lexicon of an until-now separate culture. This flood of spam destroys what was unique and interesting about the culture, and "skin-suits" it.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#39

Post by encipriano »

BurningFrog wrote: post #8
tho23i423434 wrote: post #4

I wonder how useful this really is. No doubt, it's excellent for archiving, but that's not the same as "preserving" culture. If it's not alive and kicking it's not a culture IMO. You see this happen even with texts : once things start being written down, the actual knowledge tends to get lost (see India for example). This "AI to help low-resource languages" thing is a big deal in India too, but it just feels like ano…

It's really documenting the culture. A great thing in itself. I think of cultures and languages as tools. When they don't serve a purpose anymore, they should be replaced by something more functional.

This demonstrates English utilitarianism basically won the philosophical war in Europe.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#40

Post by Lanolderen »

ahoef wrote: post #36
userbinator wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depending on how powerful the language modeling is, I suspect it could lead to an LLM which will confidently and convincingly tell you how to say things like "floppy disk" and "SSD" in every extinct language and even those that went extinct long before computers ever existed, which is... interesting, but not exactly truth. I've seen LLMs hallucinate nonexistent things in programming languages. It's hard to believe it…

Isn't this something humans would also do if there were native speakers left to speak the language?

It's common in non-dead languages. If your language is smaller you're bound to have a lot of "foreign words" in it. To this day I find it funny how my native language teachers would start to speak with tons of english and french words when they wanted to "showcase the complexity/beauty of our native language"/appear smart.

An LLM should do fine with that since it's usually the foreign word spelled in a way that makes sense in that language. I'm more curious about the inverse though. It's sometimes quite difficult to explain the meaning of a word in a language that does not have an equivalent, be it because it has a ton of different meanings or because it's some very specific action/object.

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