Skip to main content

Inclusion of African Languages into AI: What’s at Stake - Nelson Otieno

The inclusion of African indigenous languages in AI models is needed to safeguard Africans’ rights. While African languages have been resilient during European colonialism, the contemporary moment presents new challenges. 

Without deliberate efforts to integrate indigenous languages into AI models, African cultural schema and ways of writing face a greater risk of marginalization. This is why initiatives by Orange and other tech giants who plan to train AI models in African languages is a welcome development. 

The 2024 announcement highlights an awareness of AI companies investing in Africa. The first phase of this collaboration will focus on incorporating key regional languages, primarily those spoken in West Africa. Even so, these commercial ventures raise other concerns, especially when one thinks about the checkered history of industrialization.



x

Lessons from the Past

I seek to draw attention to how global historical experiences are interconnected, providing insights as we navigate the present and look toward the future. Comparisons between industrialization and digitalization can offer cautionary lessons for training AI models in African languages.

Like industrialization, the development of AI involves groundbreaking technical change. However, almost all of these changes were carried out in imperial languages. When industrial technologies were introduced to colonized spaces local languages were displaced.

Industrialization saw the abandonment of traditional crafts in favor of modern machinery, which delivered growth that favored metropoles. However, this shift came at a steep cost, as Marx and Engels documented, because rewards were uneven.

 

What is at Stake?

Keeping the uneven experience of industrialization in mind, the critical question that must be addressed is how to ensure inequalities are not repeated. These inequalities can be social, political, economic as well as linguistic. And so, how can we avoid replicating the displacement of African languages? How might African languages be integrated into the data systems used for AI training and development? How can we create markets for African languages while recognizing that market forces can also be forces that displace?

 

Mainstreaming African Languages

As we seek to answer these questions and look ahead to the incorporation of African languages into AI, several reflections are worth considering.

First, attention must be given to the range of African dialects. There may be markets for more widely spoken languages like Wolof and Pulaar. But if commercial viability is the only consideration, then there is a risk of creating an internal linguistic hierarchy that replicates displacement.

Second, it would be helpful for developers — Orange, Meta, and OpenAI — to account for the linguistic variations in the African languages. Dialects bring subtle nuances that can differ between regions, communities, and generations.

Third, AI developers can consider the standards set forth by African regional frameworks that emphasize the importance of mainstreaming languages into technological development. 

The lessons from colonial industrialization are stark. Regions excluded from early technological transformations often faced decades or even centuries of economic and social disadvantage. To avoid repeating this pattern with AI, we must act decisively during these formative stages of development to deeply integrate African languages and linguistic patterns into AI architectures and training data.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Exploiters Playground: Technology and Modern Rights Abuses - Sagwadi Mabunda,

In recent months, I have been thinking a lot about the ethics that should guide the development and deployment of modern technology. A lot can be said about getting the foundation right to realise the ultimate purpose of technology - which is to benefit human beings and the world in which we live. The lens through which we view technology, will ultimately determine the lens through which we create it. Naturally, the lenses can take varying forms. They can be   philosophical, ideological, political, ethical or moral perspectives.   Whichever perspective one chooses should ensure a better life for all. Say, then, we make the correct choice and we manage to create technology that   serves that ultimate goal. Does it go without saying that the result will be just that? In other words, say we create technology which understands that umuntu, ngumuntu ngabantu, and which seeks to protect that ethic, what happens when it is deployed? What happens when human beings, beautiful a...
Post a Comment
Read more

After AI in Africa: Some pertinent questions - Andrew Rens

Whether one views AI as a bubble or a boom, it must eventually end. If it is a bubble, AI may be sustained as improbably long as cryptocurrency, but it will inevitably subside. However, if AI is a burgeoning general technology, it will eventually become embedded in various other products and services. At that point, AI will no longer draw the same levels of investment and public scrutiny that it currently does. One question remains invisible in the formulation of AI policy across the African  continent: What will the legacy of AI be, and specifically, what infrastructure will remain after AI?  The shaping of AI's contribution to the future, through policy, implementation, and investment—whether aligned with national processes or not—seems curiously elided in the current AI debate. Lessons from South Africa's Minerals Revolution   In contemplating the end of AI in Africa, it is useful to reflect on the minerals revolution in Southern Africa that began in the 1860s and resh...
Post a Comment
Read more