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Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
51–60 of 97 posts
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#52I 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…
I am applying for graduate school (after 20 years in the software industry) with the intent of studying computational linguistics; specifically, for the documentation and support of dying/dead languages.
While I am not indigenous, I hope to help alleviate this problem. I'd love to hear about your research!
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#53Finally, a good use case for LLMs that isn’t just trying to anthropomorphize some already solved automation problem.
Yeah but anthropomorphizing the LLM makes VCs spend stupid amounts of money!
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#54I 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.
Okay colonizer.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
>who gets to decide that a language has no purpose?
The parents of the child doing the language learning or the adult doing it.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#56I 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…
I was wondering about what the limitations were.
Lots of languages, even Indo-European languages, have very different word order from English or a much less significant word order.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#57I don't understand, how can they use AI to preserve their culture when AI was never a part of it ?
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#58Earlier 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 is "they"? Are you saying transformer architecture somehow is biased towards English? Or are you saying that existing LLMs have that bias?
The only way this project is going to make sense will be to train it fresh on text in the language to be preserved, in order to avoid accidentally corrupting your model with English. If it's trained fresh on only target language content, I'm not sure how we can possibly generalize from the whole-internet models that you're familiar with.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#59I don't understand, how can they use AI to preserve their culture when AI was never a part of it ?
The same way linguists are already using audio recordings to preserve dying languages that belong to people who have never had access to audio recordings. You can make a record of a culture in a medium that they didn't/don't have themselves.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#60Earlier 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.
Have you had the opportunity to interact with less wrapped versions of the models?
There's a lot of intentionality behind the way LLM's are presented from places like ChatGPT/DeepSeek/Claude, you're distinctly trying to talk to something that's actively limited in the way it can speak to you
It's not exactly nonexistant outside of them, but they make it worse than it is