A feel-good story

This prompted by an emailed econference flier from the MIT Technology Review, which contained a reference to using ChatGPT to save the Icelandic language, ChatGPT being something I keep meaning to take an interest it, and last noticed at reference 4. Relevant posts about languages being references 5 and 6.

It seems that the 375,000 odd people in Iceland – that is to say, rather more than twice the population of our Isle of Wight, but a hundred times thinner on the ground – are worried that the tidal wave of English on the Internet and in the world of work will sweep over them and that in fairly short order the ancient Icelandic language – no doubt a world heritage language – will wither and die, will go the way of so many other small languages in the world.

So reference 1, essentially a sales pitch for GPT-4, the latest revision, comes with lots of pretty pictures of Iceland and its people. A feel-good story about how GPT-4 is going to save Icelandic for the Icelanders.

A third millennium version of the Académie Française trying to hold back the tide of English, beating up against the shores of the French? Polluting their beautiful French with all kinds of ugly (if useful) slang from the US.

But the good news it that, maybe, some good will come of this particular sort of AI. Now I learn, promoted to AGI where the ‘G’ is for general. We can do better than nerdy things like playing chess or Grand Theft Auto.

References

Reference 1: https://openai.com/customer-stories/government-of-iceland.

Reference 2: https://openai.com/.

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GPT-4. 

Reference 4: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2023/04/the-salisbury.html. 

Reference 5: http://psmv4.blogspot.com/2019/12/why-are-languages-worth-preserving.html.

Reference 6: http://psmv2.blogspot.com/2015/08/aryans.html. Icelandic is at the top of the green block, with English in the middle of that same block, and Old High German Gothic at the bottom.

Reference 7: http://icelandicsagas.com/. The source of the image, via Bing.