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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

#71

Post by lolinder »

reportgunner wrote: post #70
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.

I have never heard of that, can you elaborate ?

I mean, it's what it says on the tin: linguists go into remote areas and take recordings of dying languages to preserve them. They'll sometimes prompt for specific words and sentences, other times just record people speaking naturally. Then they'll also write down the rules of the grammar and the vocabulary (another example of using a medium they may not themselves have).

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#72

Post by cess11 »

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

I've run a bunch locally, sometimes with my own takes on system prompts and other adjustments because I've tried to make them less insufferable to use. Not as absurdly submissive, not as eager to do things I've not asked, not as censored, stuff like that.

I find they struggle a lot with things like long sentences and advanced language constructs regardless of the natural language they try to simulate. When it doesn't matter it's useful anyway, I can get a rough idea about the contents of documents in languages I'm not fluent in or make the bulk of a data set queryable in another language, but it's like a janky hack, not something I'd put in front of people paying my invoices.

Maybe there's a trick I ought to learn, I don't know.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#73

Post by numpad0 »

cess11 wrote: post #65
lolinder wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

  and getting translation in some direction or other back.
This seem to make a lot of English speakers upset, that LLM outputs appear translated from perspectives of primarily non-English speakers. But hey, it's n>=2 even at HN now.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#74

Post by flocciput »

throwaway970598 wrote: post #3

It seems like this could be incredibly fraught with danger once LLMs are involved (the story isn't exactly clear whether they are). If there are no surviving native speakers of a language (or very few) doing something like training an LLM to generate text in that language would run the risk of e.g. transferring English grammar to the vocabulary, and causing a hybrid language to become the dominant form of that langua…

Is that so bad? If the only way to ensure a language's preservation and continued use is to mangle and evolve it? I think that's kind of a neat concept, to be honest. To live is to change.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#75

Post by birdyrooster »

RobotToaster wrote: post #49
antics wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

[dead]

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#77

Post by BurningFrog »

krapp wrote: post #47
BurningFrog wrote: post #8

Earlier 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.

>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 colon…

Hebrew and Irish are illustrative examples.

Hebrew was brought back from the dead for the Jewish refugees populating Israel to have a common language. This solved a genuine practical problem.

Teaching Irish to kids who all speak English does not help anyone communicate better. It seems like a nationalist pride project, and those are not my favorite.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#78

Post by macinjosh »

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.

I wonder why their language is dying. /s

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#79

Post by antics »

bovermyer wrote: post #52
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…

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!

I did research on entirely unrelated NLP, actually. I worked on search for awhile (I am corecipient of SIGIR best paper ‘17) ad a bit in space- and memory- efficient nlp tasks.

Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture

#80

Post by antics »

RobotToaster wrote: post #49
antics wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I’m not sure that the AI itself has many ethical complications. Many terms of service grant AI companies ownership of the data you supply to them though and that very problematic for many tribes which consider the language sacred and not to be shared.
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