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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

#41

Post by meigwilym »

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.

What is the purpose of culture? It's a way of life. Arguably no culture has purpose, so do we force people to live in a different way?

Cultures and languages die out because they're slowly (or revolutionarily quickly!) replaced by another. It's not like there are people out there speaking no language because their mother tongue has died out.

And who gets to decide that a language has no purpose?

I don't like the way this argument goes.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#42

Post by cess11 »

ahoef wrote: post #37
cess11 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Swedish, german, spaniard spanish, french and luxembourgish french.

Sometimes they do a decent translation, too often they trip up on grammar, vocabulary or just assuming that a string of bytes means the same thing always. I find they work best in extremely formal settings, like documents produced by governments and lawyers.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#43

Post by lyu07282 »

lolinder wrote: post #20
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…

Importantly, the hallucinating non-existent things in programming languages is still stringing together valid English words to make something that looks like it ought to be a correct concept. It doesn't construct new words from scratch. If a language model were asked what the word for "floppy disk" was in an extinct language and it invented a decent circumlocution, I don't think that would be a bad thing. People who…

I also don't think it was ever much of a problem for machine translation to begin with. Also modern conversational systems are already addressing the problem (with things like contrastive/counterfactual fine-tuning and RAG/in-context learning) and will just tell you if it doesn't know something instead of hallucinating. But I'm pretty sure op doesn't know the difference between a language model and conversational model anyway, its just the generic "anti-LLM" opinion without much substance.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#44

Post by yaseer »

antics wrote: post #15

I am one of these people! I am one of a handful of people who speak my ancestral language, Kiksht. I am lucky to be uniquely well-suited to this work, as I am (as far as I know) the lone person from my tribe whose academic research background is in linguistics, NLP, and ML. (We have, e.g. , linguists, but very few computational linguists.) So far I have not had that much luck getting the models to learn the Kiksht gr…

Super interesting, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts!

HN is still one of the few places on the internet to get such esoteric, expert and intellectually stimulating content. It's like an Island where the spirit of 'the old internet' still lives on.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#45

Post by diggan »

antics wrote: post #25
amarant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow kiksht sounds like a pretty cool language! Are there any resources you'd recommend for the language itself? I'm mostly curious about the whole "a verb with prefix structure can be a whole sentence" thing, that sounds like a pretty cool language feature!

So, bad news. Culturally, the Wasq'u consider Kiksht something that is for the community rather than outsiders. So unfortunately I think it will be extremely challenging to find someone to teach you, or resources to teach yourself.

How do you combine that feeling/observation together with what you're working on now, which I'm guessing you'll eventually want to publish/make available somehow? Or maybe I misunderstand what the "it will eventually be of help" part of your first comment.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#46

Post by diggan »

antics wrote: post #22
koolba wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia there were 69 fluent speakers of Kiksht in 1990, and the last one passed away in 2012. How did you learn the language? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Chinook_language

I learned it from my grandmother and from Gladys's grandkid. Gladys was the last person whose first language was Kiksht, not the last person who speaks it.

FYI, the Wikipedia article currently states:

> The last fully fluent speaker of Kiksht, Gladys Thompson, died in July 2012

Which is from https://web.archive.org/web/20191010153203/http://www.opb.or...

Maybe there are some sources talking about fully fluent people still being alive? As currently the article gives the impression they were the last person to "fully" speak it.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#47

Post by krapp »

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.

>When they don't serve a purpose anymore, they should be replaced by something more functional.

If and when that's a voluntary and organic process, sure. The problem is that replacement more often that not comes about through ethnic cleansing and violence. These indigenous languages were perfectly functional to the people who spoke them at the time but they were replaced because they didn't serve the purpose of colonizers.

And "lost" languages do get reclaimed from time to time. Hebrew and Irish being two examples.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#48

Post by diggan »

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…

How would terms like "floppy disk" and "SSD" even appear in the target language if those terms weren't around when the speakers of the language was alive? Or you're thinking a multi-language LLM that tries to automatically translate between terms it didn't actually see in the source/target language during training?

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#49

Post by RobotToaster »

antics wrote: post #25
amarant wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow kiksht sounds like a pretty cool language! Are there any resources you'd recommend for the language itself? I'm mostly curious about the whole "a verb with prefix structure can be a whole sentence" thing, that sounds like a pretty cool language feature!

So, bad news. Culturally, the Wasq'u consider Kiksht something that is for the community rather than outsiders. So unfortunately I think it will be extremely challenging to find someone to teach you, or resources to teach yourself.

Does that present philosophical questions on if an AI is part of the community or an outsider?

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#50

Post by diggan »

Mengkudulangsat wrote: post #27

On an side note, can anyone recommend an AI tool I can use to learn a random niche language as a hobby (e.g. Toki Pona)?

I think what most LLMs have in common, is that they're pretty good at translations out-of-the-box, even the general purpose ones. Probably even the free versions of ChatGPT, Claude or fully free DeepSeek can help you out pretty well with that.
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