Maybe one day an article like this would be written about a company that collaborates with local artists and writers to produce these books, and a home grown machine translation company, rather than Chat GPT and Google Translate 🤔
I think of the children's stories I heard growing up in Ethiopia, & how specific they were to the context. And when my elders tell me stories about various villages in Eritrea, they are super super specific. Why not preserve that & pass it on?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/04/13/mali-books-artificial-intelligence-ai/
My 2 cents? We should empower local artists and writers and story tellers and build tools to do that, rather than using technology built on stolen artists' work and exploited labor right from the continent.
@timnitGebru forgive me if I missed it, but the article is long on language and devoid on culture. Neither really breathes without the other, (even white English)
@olav @timnitGebru the simple reason is that LLMs are a pure case of language without culture. Even as we start to identify biases present in models, we completely fail to associate them to the culture that they come from, to the extent that we risk attributing features of the recursive GenAI loop to human society as a whole.
There's also a lot of research on how narrower culture-specific models outperform LLMs on tasks, related to the corresponding cultures. All this should be obvious, but gets subdued in the AI marketing hype
@mapto @timnitGebru
It's deeper than that. Particularly groups that have little or no written language rely on an oral tradition which aren't passed down by a technical robot