Alternative perspective:
Small languages can benefit a lot from machine translation. In a world where most texts can be autotranslated, reading or even listening to e.g. Wikipedia in ones own language will be much easier.
Small languages can benefit a lot from machine translation. In a world where most texts can be autotranslated, reading or even listening to e.g. Wikipedia in ones own language will be much easier.
Having a language that can not be machine translated, may be beneficial. [1]
1. https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/navajo-code-talkers-and-th...
Instead of gnashing our teeth and tearing our hair, why don’t we enlist technology to help us with our problems? If you’re someone passionate about preserving a language, compile the language samples and bring in speakers to label and help train a model that can perpetuate the language as it’s idiomatically used forever.
You need "Plain old artificial intelligence" systems, which are designed for these languages, which are more complex, more fixed machines but can generate better output with less "knowledge".
Otherwise, LLMs plus small languages without enough corpus become "language in garbage out," and you'll do more damage to these languages.
e.g.: You ask a linguist about nitty gritty details of a language and try to codify as much as possible to a system (e.g. PROLOG), and let the built thing loose on the corpus and see how it works.
Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of others in Benin and neighboring countries—as “a fictional language.”
This result, which I replicated, is not unusual. Dossou is accustomed to the feeling that his culture is unseen by technology that so easily serves other people. He grew up with no Wikipedia pages in Fon, and no translation programs to help him communicate with his mother in French, in which he is more fluent. “When we have a technology that treats something as simple and fundamental as our name as an error, it robs us of our personhood,” Dossou told me.
While increased access is a huge win, it won't stop cultural homogenization. I don't think it's unique to generative AI, but like many other things on the net, it's accelerating it.