Who: Dr Deepshikha Behera, IASH Digital Research Postdoctoral Fellow.
When: Friday 17th October, 15:00-16:00
Where: EFI 3.00 and online
Abstract
My research focuses on the impact of text generative AI and LLMs in studying low resource languages within a decolonial context and understands the impact that intervention of text generative AI has had on different contexts of language use, with special focus on translation, and knowledge production of low resource languages. It is apparent that the intervention of AI has produced new ways of using linguistic skills for oral language-cultures that do not have a significant presence in the lettered world. My experiments so far have captured the manner in which careful prompt engineering and ongoing dialogue with the machine help in working with low-resource languages and complex situations of language difference and contestation. This seminar delineates the strategies adopted to translate poems emerging from the Miya poetry movement in contemporary Assam, educate the LLM in context, questioning its assumptions about language, and uploading materials such as an alphabet script, audio-visual tools to make it learn the importance of the latent heterogeneity within plurilingual language-worlds. With the intervention of AI, the human experience of translation, which shapes and is further shaped in the process of establishing a relationship with an ‘other’, and the modalities of language experience becomes complex. Acts of ‘doing’ language, through writing, reading, talking, listening are intervened by the arching presence of AI that can participate in acts which were earlier contingent upon human experience. This paper aims at mediating into the networks of AI as sites of learning and knowledge production, and that of cultural exchange which is facilitated in the shared socialites of language use in everyday speech as well as creative writing. With AI and LLMs intervening into this site, questions regarding the production, acquisition and dissemination of knowledge become inevitable. While the contribution of AI and LLMs in research and academic practices is undeniably important, this seminar intends to rethink the manner in which these models acquire existing knowledge and generate responses, thus engaging with the technicalities of prompt engineering and AI training along with concerns of ethics and representation. I outline the several ways in which integration of orality and oral resources into the study of marginalised language-cultures that do not have a significant presence in the textual literary space could be useful in paving the way towards an ethical human-AI collaboration. I seek to connect with scholars working in the field of AI and sound, AI and music or AI and voice and learn from their expertise.
