Can AI help Indigenous communities preserve their cultures?
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Indigenous communities are thinking about possibilities and concerns for how AI can help them preserve and pass on their languages and their cultures.
Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud is joined by Indigenous artists Marek Tyler and Susan Blight to discuss how AI could integrate Indigenous values and provide knowledge for future generations.
We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.
WATCH | Today's episode on YouTube:
Elamin: Marek, talk to me a little about the most promising aspect of what AI could do for Indigenous communities.
Marek: One of the most promising aspects, in my opinion, for AI is the potential to support Indigenous self-determination by enabling data systems that reflect our values and our languages and our governance practices. Now, OK, how? Well, when ethically developed, I think an AI can manage and protect their cultural knowledge and facilitate collective decision-making, grounded in our worldview.
I think it's most important to remember that it's a tool to strengthen sovereignty, it's not just to boost efficiency. It depends entirely on who owns it, who controls the technology, who owns the infrastructure. So imagine 50 years from right now, Susan and I, our nieces' and nephews' generations coming, imagine them collaborating with their aunties and uncles who helped train that AI 50 years prior. Because their community took the responsibility to own their knowledge, to take care of the knowledge, to own the data, to care of infrastructure.
My thoughts are when — not if — Indigenous communities start training AI, we're not just going to feed it data. We're teaching it the principles of iyinisiwin [wisdom and knowledge]. We are teaching it to practice respect, humility, uphold our governance systems — all of those pieces so that it learns to learn like us, to think like us, to walk in our ways. So we decide who the helper is and how they're taught and what they're taught, and how the future generations are going to be served, not the other way around.
Elamin: Protecting the environment is a core belief for a lot of Indigenous communities. But one of the biggest concerns around AI technology is the environmental impact of so much energy, so much water, goes into maintaining large AI systems. Susan, what do you make of the risks and the benefits that come with bringing AI into Indigenous communities and thinking about using it in that way?
Susan: Yeah, I think it represents one of the main areas, or arenas, of contention as it pertains to Indigenous AI or Indigenous people using AI. And that has to do with the fact that any technology that we employ has to align with our values. And so the environmental impacts of AI not currently having a system to run it that is sustainable is something that a lot of Indigenous people are talking about. But this also goes to what Marek is talking about as well, which is how we introduce our concepts, our place-based ways of living and being, as well as frameworks that are sustainable and reciprocal, into AI. We are not going to rely on something that is not sustainable and that actually harms the environment and our non-human relations.
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