Announcement: 12.07.2024 – Online Lecture by Jörg Phil Friedrich: "Artificial Intelligence and 'Low Resource Languages': Challenges for Culture and Society"

12 July 2024, 2:00 pm, by AAI Webmaster

Photo: ahmedgad (Ahmed Gad) | Pixabay, scaled

We kindly invite you to this online lecture in English language on Friday, July 12th, 2024, at 14:00–16:00 h (CEST/MESZ).

Topic:
    "Artificial Intelligence and 'Low Resource Languages': Challenges for Culture and Society"

Speaker:
    Jörg Phil Friedrich

Affiliation:
    Softwarehaus INDAL

Date/Time:
    July 12^th, 2024 (Friday), 14:00 – 16:00 (CEST/MESZ)

Language:
    English

Zoom Link:
    https://uni-hamburg.zoom.us/j/64563521222?pwd=OEdSbENCOUV2Ynl5ZUdnNG5mM1pwQT09

Zoom Meeting-ID:
    645 6352 1222

Zoom Passcode:
    hgtlecture

About this lecture:

Large AI systems can simulate natural language communication with humans, generate news, convert data into readable texts, summarize long essays and even produce advertising slogans. The point is that such Large Language Models (LLMs) are trained on huge amounts of text. But this training data is largely written in English. It turns out that it is relatively easy to apply these LLMs to languages related to English because in most cases, the query is translated into English and a new English response is generated, which is then translated back into its original language, e.g. German.

But even in European languages related to English, like German, there is a loss of diversity and linguistic individuality.  This becomes an even dramatic problem when this technique is tried with languages that are far removed from English in structure, word meanings and, ultimately, cultural tradition, such as Thai, Vietnamese, Hindi, and Swahili.

So, what new communication problems, especially in social situations where these worlds come together emerge? What happens when the language of medicine, created or shaped by AI, meets the everyday language of people who are at home in traditional languages?

The talk will trace this process, try to draw out the consequences and find ways of dealing with the problems that arise using machine translation for traditional languages, including those of Asia.

Brief profile:

Jörg Phil Friedrich, born 1965, is a philosopher, publicist, and IT entrepreneur. He studied physics, meteorology, and later philosophy; he has a diploma in meteorology and a Master of Arts in philosophy. He writes for various online and print media on philosophical aspects of the present age and an interconnected world. His most recent book "Die postoptimistische Gesellschaft" appeared at Herder Verlag, and his critique of Artificial Intelligence "Degenerierte Vernunft. Künstliche Intelligenz und die Natur des Denkens" with Claudius. Friedrich is married and has two children and two grandchildren.

We would like to thank the Hamburg Society for Thai Studies and the Bernhard Nocht Institute for Tropical Medicine (BNITM) for the cooperation. 

You can also find all this information on our Instagram account and on our flyer.