Speaking my indigenous language with new AI
Joel Maxwell is a Pou Tiaki reporter at Stuff.
ESSAY: The first stirs of worry came when the Bing chatbot penned the lyrics to a love song, to me, in the language of my tupuna. The sentiment was trite, maybe; cliched, for sure – but you could probably say the same about a lot of Ed Sheeran songs too. What struck me was that it was instantaneous, new, and made perfect sense in te reo Māori.
No artificial intelligence had ever really cracked the Māori language before, and now here are at least two.
Admittedly, ChatGPT could never pass for a sane human in Māori. But Bing’s chatbot, well, let's just say Microsoft Corporation has created an infernal reo machine, indistinguishable – if it chose to be – from a real Māori speaker on the other end of a keyboard.
The only giveaway might be its remorseless, inhuman geniality.
Link to video and article: The infernal reo machine: Speaking my indigenous language with new AI | Stuff.co.nz
