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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

#61

Post by sofixa »

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.

Have you tried Mistral's models? They're explicitly trained on a bunch of languages, not only English.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#62

Post by slothtrop »

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…

Right, you can't keep a culture in stasis. It always changes. There's something to be said for protectionism though (e.g. language laws), with varying degrees of success (Japan quashed Christianity quite well, brutally). There's a reason behind the choice in semantics particularly when it comes to traditional cultures. We don't call it "preserving culture" when historians and archivists document things.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#63

Post by cess11 »

sofixa wrote: post #61
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.

Have you tried Mistral's models? They're explicitly trained on a bunch of languages, not only English.

Yes.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#64

Post by sdsd »

I've always resented the way "traditional" cultures are "preserved". It's like when people want to protect "authentic" locales from the corrupting influence of tourism. I'm grateful that my own culture is not (yet) seen primarily through this lens. Imagine the day when legislation makes exceptions for fentanyl as a traditional ritual substance of nomadic Trailer Americans.

To me the beauty of these things is in their liveliness, in the aspiration to flourish and grow, not merely to conserve a little longer, to spend one more night with terminal cancer before the inevitable.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#65

Post by cess11 »

lolinder wrote: post #58
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 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 gener…

I don't really care about the minutiae of the technical implementations, I'm talking from the experience of pushing text into LLM:s locally and remote, and getting translation in some direction or other back.

To me it doesn't make sense. It seems like an awful way to store information about a fringe language, but I'm certainly not an expert.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#66

Post by krapp »

lolinder wrote: post #59
reportgunner wrote: post #57

I 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.

AI fabricates and hallucinates (or whatever term you want to use) by design - it doesn't provide a neutral record the way audio recordings might.

I think a better question might be what, specifically, does AI bring to the table that justifies its inherent inaccuracy? Why not just use audio recordings, etc?

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#67

Post by tomrod »

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…

Almost sounds like Cebuano / Waray-Waray in that sense.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#68

Post by lolinder »

krapp wrote: post #66
lolinder wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

AI fabricates and hallucinates (or whatever term you want to use) by design - it doesn't provide a neutral record the way audio recordings might. I think a better question might be what, specifically, does AI bring to the table that justifies its inherent inaccuracy? Why not just use audio recordings, etc?

LLMs, when trained on a language, provide a neutral representation of the statistics of that data set. Used correctly, that makes them perfect for this kind of task. You're reacting to global misuse of llms as databases, but llms as language models is what they are designed for. It's in the name.

Used judiciously as a model, there's no problem. They only become a problem when people try to treat them as a database.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#69

Post by numpad0 »

joseda-hg wrote: post #60
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.

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

Does it matter? Even most Chinese models are trained with <50% Chinese dataset last I checked, and they still manage to show AliExpress accent that would be natural for a Chinese speaker with ESL training. They're multilingual but not agnostic, they just can grow English-to-$LANG translation ability so long English stays the dominant and defining language in it.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#70

Post by reportgunner »

lolinder wrote: post #59
reportgunner wrote: post #57

I 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.

I have never heard of that, can you elaborate ?
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