Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
1–10 of 97 posts
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#2Finally, a good use case for LLMs that isn’t just trying to anthropomorphize some already solved automation problem.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#3It 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 language, because the LLM is used widely for study and the native-speaking elders are not.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#4I 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 another "jumla" for academics/techbros to make money. I mean, India has brutal/vicious policies that are out to destroy any and every language that's not English (since it's automatically a threat to central rule from Delhi), but pretty much no intellectual, either in India or the US, actually cares about the mass-wiping out of Indian languages by English... Not even the ones who go "ree bad British man destroyed India" on twitter all day.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#5This is a fantastic use case for LLM’s. Also, godspeed to these researchers! There’s unfortunately not a lot of time left for many of these languages.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#6I 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.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#7s/preserve/hallucinate/
The next few decades are going to be really, really weird.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#8I 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.
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#9s/preserve/hallucinate/ The next few decades are going to be really, really weird.
[flagged]
Re: Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
#10Fwiw this is the original usage of llms. The whole context awareness came about for the purpose of translations and the famous ‘attention is all you need’ paper was from the google translation team.
Say what you will about llms being overhyped but this is the original core use case.