How about we raise the issue to powerful people with ties to the Māori people and convince them to give their support and platform to Te Hiku Media so they can better protect their work? Off the top of my head Taika Waititi has Disney money and really cares about decolonisation.

⁵ get caught by the border patrol in, say, Nepal, one of us *might* get by with Google. The other one is screwed. This isn't a dream pipe; it's a necessity, and if at all possible we should find a way to empower those who know the most from being in charge of that change. So how do we go about that?

⁴ and that's not even getting into accessibility; indigenous deaf people are doubly isolated from their communities bc sign language schools often only operate in hegemonic languages. Travelling migrants depend on the luck of an interpreter to get them out of trouble. If me and a Quechua speaker

³ to power the LLMs. It's difficult, and more competent hands than mine should be organising it. But it's a hard effort for a long term benefit. Imagine you could speak Yokot'an to your phone and it wrote it out in Maya glyphs. If anything will help indigenous-led language preservation, it's that.

² experts in each language. We're not gonna solve this by complaining about OpenAI and Meta; they don't care. We should use our available resources to do it the right way instead. Creating indigenous-lead and -authorised databases to begin with, and IMEs to match their writing. THEN use those

Yeah, but that's not a problem with LLMs. It's a problem with every field of research under our current economic system. Blaming the tech is completely missing the point; instead of fighting about it we should be promoting the creation of open source LLMs through the freely given input of native ¹

This kind of disqualifies the majority of humanity from being called intelligent as well

⁶ This work is vital to breathe life in languages that are losing speakers exponentially every generation. And it must be lead by indigenous voices.
A hammer can build a house or break a skull. LLMs are not the devil. They're a tool. We should learn to use it for good, not police who can access them

⁴ happen to their domain of their mother tongue? We've known since Luther & Gutenberg the importance of accessing culture in your own language, in all contexts. Also, development of LLMs will require other tech advancements towards language preservation: unicode encoding, large databases, IMEs. ⁵

² alive and thriving. A language that only exists in a linguistics thesis does not constitute preservation, it's mummification. Fact is, most people only read and write digitally on a daily basis. If an indigenous person can only do that in Spanish, or in the Latin alphabet, what do you think will ³

I agree. Which is why members of those communities should be leading the research towards the development of said LLMs. The tool itself won't preserve anything. The act of empowering speakers of those languages to use them with the same ease as hegemonic languages is essential towards keeping them ¹

I’d recommend a few titles, too: THE PRNCE & THE COYOTE; FEATHERED SERPENT, DARK HEART OF SKY; SECRET OF THE MOON CONCH; THE SONGS OF THE DROWNED series by Anna Stephens; SUN OF BLOOD AND RUIN by Mariela Lares; BLACK SUN by Rebecca Roanhorse