2024-12-01 00:02:12
How Indigenous engineers are using AI to preserve their culture
Indigenous researchers face紧迫的时间压力,全球4000种土著语言中,每两周就有一种消失。Michael Running Wolf, Indigenous in AI的创始人,表示在未来5到10年内,美国大多数原住民语言将面临灭绝的风险。Running Wolf领导First Languages AI Reality项目,旨在为北美200多种濒危土著语言建立语音识别模型。然而,该项目面临的重大障碍是缺乏既懂语言又了解文化的土著计算机科学家毕业生。目前,每年仅有少数土著人在科技行业工作或获得计算机科学学位,Native-founded公司仅获得极少量的风险投资资金。为了改变这一状况,一些土著工程师正在通过组织如First Languages AI Reality和Tech Natives等项目来培训原住民学生,以保护本土文化和语言,并开发文化相关的计算机课程。此外,AI也被用于填补其他方面的土著文化空白,包括虚拟现实体验和艺术创作实践。
Indigenous researchers are up against a ticking clock: Of the 4,000 Indigenous languages worldwide,Â
one dies every two weeks
 with its last speaker. âWithin the next five to 10 years, weâll lose most of the Native American languages in the U.S.,â Michael Running Wolf, founder ofÂ
Indigenous in AI
, an international community of Native, Aboriginal, and First Nations engineers, said.Â
Running Wolf has dedicated his career to preventing this loss. He leadsÂ
First Languages AI Reality
, an initiative of the Mila-Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, where researchers are building speech recognition models for overÂ
200
 endangered Indigenous languages in North America.
However, first, he must overcome a major roadblock: There arenât enough Indigenous computer scientist graduates â people who know the language and culture â to tackle these language preservation projects. Running Wolf emphasized that Indigenous scientists know to respect the data itself. âThe core data we use isnât just tweets or social media posts; itâs deeply culturally identifying information from speakers who may have passed away,â he said. âWe need to make sure that the community is always retaining their relationship to the data.â
Running Wolf said that in his years of artificial intelligence research, heâs only come across about a dozen Indigenous North American AI scientists. âWe only graduate one or two Indigenous Ph.D.s in AI and computer science every year,â he said. Â
Indigenous people make upÂ
less than 0.005%
 of the tech workforce in the U.S., hold onlyÂ
0.4% of bachelorâs degrees
 in computer science every year and haveÂ
one board member
 at the top 200 tech companies. In 2022, Native-founded companies only received a mereÂ
0.02%Â
of total venture capital funding.
Thatâs where the handful of Indigenous engineers who do exist come in: They are leading organizations like First Languages AI Reality,Â
IndigiGenius
,Â
Tech Natives
 and theÂ
Wihanble Sâa Center for Indigenous AI
 to train Native American, Alaska Native and Native Hawaiian computer science students to preserve Indigenous culture and language.Â
âTraditionally, AI assumes that data is proprietary, and that can be harmful for Indigenous communities,â Running Wolf said. âWe want to demonstrate that we can succeed in our mission of reclaiming Indigenous languages ethically with ethical AI protocols.â
Building the Indigenous-tech pipeline
Kyra Kaya is one of the dozens of beneficiaries of the tech training programÂ
Tech Natives
, an organization of Indigenous women in tech that offers mentorship and recruitment opportunities on college campuses.
Â
Studying computer science at Yale University, Kaya was inspired to build an AI tool that would honor her Native Hawaiian grandmother, with whom she spent summers in Maui. âI realized many Native Hawaiians donât have access to technology that many people take for granted,â the 20-year-old said.
She fed the tool Hawaiian Pidgin English, aÂ
heavily stigmatized
 English-basedÂ
creole language
 used by many Hawaii residents, and trained it to recognize spoken phrases. âI wanted to change the narrative around pidgin as a âlesser language,ââ she said. âI input phrases that my grandmother, aunties and mother used and got it to identify them.âÂ
Kaya hopes to turn her work into an app accessible to other Hawaii locals. âAI and the tech industry have the power to either uplift or silence marginalized groups like mine,â she said. âThatâs why Indigenous people can and should play a large role in it.âÂ
Researchers say getting more Indigenous people into the tech industry begins with piquing their interest at a young age. In South Dakota every summer, IndigiGeniusâÂ
Lakota AI Code Camp
 brings together Native teens for three weeks toÂ
design an app
 that documents the Lakota culture, including sacred plants and everyday Lakota words. Since its launch in 2022, the code camp has trained 33 students to contribute to the app, many of whom have returned as instructors or pursued other computer science projects.
To continue tech education throughout the school year, IndigiGenius has also launched T3PD, training a group of 20 mostly Native high school teachers across the country to develop culturally relevant computer science courses at their schools.Â
Only 67%
 of Native students have access to a computer science course, lower than any other student demographic, and the organization is partnering with teachers to bring laptops and computer science classes to their students.Â
âItâs about making AI education culturally relevant for students,â IndigiGenius Executive Director Andrea Delgado-Olson said. âWhat sets us apart is how weâre utilizing Indigenous knowledge to bridge technology with our traditions.âÂ
Preserving other aspects of Indigenous culture with AIÂ
AI is also helping to fill Indigenous cultural gaps beyond language. As a child, Madeline Gupta seldom visited her Chippewa lands. But as she grew older, the call to return to her ancestral lands grew stronger. âI had this feeling that I belonged on that land, that my ancestors wanted me there,â Gupta said.Â
She said that after the governmentÂ
tore tribal members away from their land
 and their familiesÂ
from 1819 to 1969
, many were disconnected from their roots. âMy tribe has about 50,000 people, but only 2,000 of them live on the reservation,â the 21-year-old Yale student said. âThat means thousands of students havenât seen their own lands.âÂ
In college, Gupta joined the Tech Natives program and proposed an immersive virtual reality experience for Native youth to âvisitâ their traditional lands in the Great Lakes region. After securing funding from the Aspen Institute and the Yale School of Medicine, Gupta traveled to Mackinac Island this past summer to film and record stories from tribal elders, capturing 3D spatial video on her phone, then recording the audio stories to accompany it. She hopes to create a virtual reality map of the island that users can click into to view videos related to the area.
âI want to reach people who donât currently feel connected to the land or donât know our stories,â she said.Â
In addition to cultural preservation, artists are also using artificial intelligence in their creative practices. Suzanne Kite at Bard Collegeâs Wihanble Sâa Center for Indigenous AI describes herself as one of the first American Indian artists to use machine learning in art. âMy question is simple: How do we create ethical art with AI by applying Indigenous ontologies?â she said.Â
Kite dug into the Lakota dream language to process the knowledge that her family received through their dreams from spirits and animals. She spent three months last year recording all of her dreams, then used machine learning to translate the contents into a Lakota womenâs geometric language commonly used in beadwork and quiltwork. She also turned her dreams into a graphic score for theÂ
American Composers Orchestra
. âI try to resist Western personification of AI and instead dig into the hyperlocal, grounded and practical frameworks of knowledge that American Indigenous communities provide,â Kite said.Â
While many of these Indigenous AI projects are in their early stages, Running Wolf hopes programs like his will be irrelevant in a decade or two. His dream is to revive dying languages and enable new generations of Native speakers to create ethical tech. âI hope this technology will be remembered as an artifact of a troubled time,â he said.Â
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