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Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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).

Well that I understand, but how is the AI involved ? You don't use AI to travel to remote areas or to record voice.

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