Misleading clickbait title: "the AI revolution" is doing nothing to languages. It just reflects the current state of languages. How is that a problem?
Yes, it's continuation of the same pattern we've been seeing for decades, but I think it's fair to say that generative AI will escalate that pattern dramatically unless specifically addressed.
> How is that a problem?
Setting aside my aesthetic enjoyment of the wide variety of languages that exist in the world, there's a strictly utilitarian argument to be made that placing the majority of the world's population in the status of second-class citizen (having to perpetually conduct all business in a language other than their native tongue) is not the best way to serve humanity as a whole.
Without asserting that English would be a good choice of global language; this seems like a terrible reason to silo huge chunks of humanity from each other. There is an extremely good argument that we should all standardise on Mandarin Chinese with a better alphabet to promote good international communication.
We're in an era where nuclear-armed powers are fighting each other again. Unclear international communication could literally get us all killed. The aesthetics of everyone having their own lingo is not worth the risk.
That's why I set that argument aside.
Mandarin may win the first one, but fails the second one dramatically.
Few people outside China speak Mandarin as their first language.
Mandarin has L1: 940 million, L2: 200 million -> 1.14 billion
English has L1: 380 million L2: 1.077 billion -> 1.46 billion
Also, most of the L2 Mandarin speakers live in China, with another Chinese dialect as their native language.
Consider the dual nature of technology: it can indeed centralize or decentralize. For less-spoken languages, AI and machine learning can be leveraged to preserve and revitalize them. Projects like Google's Woolaroo (https://artsandculture.google.com/project/woolaroo), using machine learning to help preserve endangered languages by translating them into more widely spoken ones, hint at potential pathways forward.
While generative AI may currently favor dominant languages due to the sheer volume of data available, there’s growing awareness and effort to make these technologies more inclusive. This includes not only better representation in training data but also the development of tools specifically aimed at language preservation.
It's cool that it can be addressed though, right? AI can be both, the fast track to escalating the issue and the fast track to deescalating the issue. Interesting.
I'm not so sure about that. I was amused when playing with ChatGPT shortly after it was public that it could answer questions in Esperanto and even write the silly sorts of stories in it than it can in English.
This article is just desperately lacking in awareness like this - see also how, frustratingly, it barely mentions how a language is spoken first, and only maybe written second, but doesn't spend much time on that aspect.
You can’t count all languages and then divide by total population and say that the dividend is the proper amount of speakers every language should have. It’s idiotic. It’s like saying we should have equal outcomes in a given society (pick homogenous S Korea for example) and saying there should be equal outcomes despite a bell distribution. It flies in the face of reality. Some people are more apt, some people are lazy, some just lack ability for what they choose despite all efforts. It's not to say we should avoid unfairness --but the saying we should have equal outcomes is silly.
Perhaps it is just chance that your examples all involve peoples' internal characteristics, but it is a great mistake to eliminate external factors. An energetic, motivated genius born to disease and starvation-level poverty is extremely unlikely to experience the success that a lazy idiot born to great wealth and privilege will.
It's like claiming that how far rocks go when they fall off the mountain depends entirely on how big they are, and that where they came from on the mountain doesn't matter.
Beck and Foreman, are examples of people, who as kids had absolutely nothing, but succeeded.
Wiser use of resources is a great conversation to have, but so is a balance of priorities and a less authoritarian approach to consensus-building.
The AI revolution is not doing a damned thing to languages. Resources are finite, technology makes them more abundant, the more resources we have, the easier it is to spend more resources on doing things like maintaining endangered languages.
By any reasonable measure, people who care about maintaining endangered languages should be ecstatic about every development that makes resources more abundant, but they are never, which makes me doubt that they care about the endangered languages.
It's really the same with nuclear energy. Nuclear energy provides a solution we can use today to solve our carbon emission problem, but nuclear energy allows technological development to continue apace, which is why groups like Extinction Rebellion would rather vandalize art and economic activity than advocate for nuclear energy.