In language we build our own identities, our relationships with others, the countries that we live in, the companies we have, and the values that we hold dear. With language we generate life. Without language we are mostly chimpanzees.’ - Fernando Flores

Through my reporting, I’ve come to understand two things: Artificial intelligence is a technology that takes many forms. It is in fact a multitude of technologies that shape-shift and evolve, not merely based on technical merit but with the ideological drives of the people who create them and the winds of hype and commercialization. While ChatGPT and other so-called large language models or generative AI applications have now taken the limelight, they are but one manifestation of AI, a manifestation that embodies a particular and remarkably narrow view about the way the world is and the way it should be. Nothing about this form of AI coming to the fore or even existing at all was inevitable; it was the culmination of thousands of subjective choices, made by the people who had the power to be in the decision-making room. In the same way, future generations of AI technologies are not predetermined. But the question of governance returns: Who will get to shape them?

Computer vision seeks to re-create our sight; natural language processing and generation, our ability to read and write; speech recognition and synthesis, our ability to hear and speak; and image and video generation, our creativity and imagination. As software for each of these capabilities has advanced, researchers have subsequently sought to combine them into so-called multimodal systems—systems that can “see” and “speak,” “hear” and “read.” That the technology is now threatening to replace large swaths of human workers is not by accident but by design.

Large language models accelerate language loss. Even for models several generations earlier like GPT-2, 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. Among the over seven thousand languages that still exist today, almost half are endangered according to UNESCO; about a third have some online presence; less than 2 percent are supported by Google Translate; and according to OpenAI’s own testing, only fifteen, or 0.2 percent, are supported by GPT-4 above an 80 percent accuracy. 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.

Language is a product of a community in its economic, political, and cultural evolution in time and space. In their very negotiation with nature and with one another, humans give birth to a system of communication whose highest expression and development is the organized sound that we call language. But language is also the producer of a community, for it is language, after all, that enables humans to negotiate effectively their way into and out of nature and that makes our multifaceted evolution possible. It is in that very negotiation with nature that a community comes to know itself as a specific community different from others.