Karen Hao

Over the years, I’ve found only one metaphor
that encapsulates the nature of what these AI
power players are: empires. During the long
era of European colonialism, empires seized
and extracted resources that were not their
own and exploited the labor of the people
they subjugated to mine, cultivate, and
refine those resources for the empire’s
enrichment. They projected racist,
dehumanizing ideas of their own superiority
and modernity to justify—and even entice the
conquered into accepting—the invasion of
sovereignty, the theft, and the subjugation.
They justified their quest for power by the
need to compete with other empires: In an
arms race, all bets are off. All this
ultimately served to entrench each empire’s
power and to drive its expansion and
progress. In the simplest terms, empires
amassed extraordinary riches across space and
time, through imposing a colonial world
order, at great expense to everyone else.
 

It’s hard to fully convey the tragedy of losing a language. For the same reasons AI researchers first gravitated toward language to build their technologies, the loss of a language extends far beyond the loss of a form of communication. Each language encodes within it rich histories, cultures, knowledge; it is the collective product of millions of people across time grasping for the sounds and written forms to capture the subtlest observations about the universe, about life, about the human experience; to share with one another stunning beauty and painful failure; to teach a child, to learn from an elder; to express love.
 

To lose a language is a global tragedy; it’s also a personal one. To be severed from your inheritance and forced to preserve someone else’s, or risk being beaten, is to establish, in one of the rawest ways possible, a clear hierarchy between whose history, whose culture, whose knowledge deserves to be passed down and whose is so insignificant it deserves to be erased.
 

Large language models accelerate language loss...there are only a few languages in the world that are spoken by enough people and documented online at sufficient scale to fulfill the data imperative of these models...As these models become digital infrastructure, the internet’s accessibility to different language communities—and the accessibility of the economic opportunities it­ provides—will continue to shrink, incentivizing more and more of those communities to prioritize learning and speaking a dominant language like English over their own.