Scientific researchers are asking the authorities to promote a plan to defend the Portuguese language in the context of Artificial Intelligence, at the risk of the technological intermediation of Portuguese being left in the hands of the big tech companies.
In a petition that already has half a thousand signatories – available at https://www.change.org/p/apelo-sobre-ia-para-a-língua-portuguesa – the authors ask “the authorities to design and put into practice a plan for the technological preparation of the Portuguese language for the era of Artificial Intelligence, with the informed support of the scientific community specializing in this area”.
“For the democratization of this technology, a plan that favours the development and open access to open source solutions for Portuguese language technology is vital, observing the appropriate regulations,” the petition reads.
“Very soon, the use of the Portuguese language will be like the use of any other natural language and will be done through permanent technological intermediation,” which includes automatic transcriptions of telephone conversations or summaries of meetings, António Branco, a professor at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Lisbon and one of the promoters of this petition, explained to Lusa.
This summary will be able to give “suggestions for changing the tone of voice, for example”, explained António Branco. To this will be added permanent automatic translation systems when in contact with a foreigner.
Today, “this technological intermediation technique is concentrated in three or four large technology companies and this is a cause for concern, because it creates immense dependence and jeopardizes the cultural autonomy and digital citizenship” of countries, he warned.
In other countries, there is already concern about protecting national languages, such as Sweden or the Netherlands, or even Slovenia or Estonia, which are investing in tools for public use to protect their national languages.
In Portugal, Brazil and the other Portuguese-speaking countries, there is “a feeling that decision-makers and authorities are still not sufficiently aware of the importance of this issue”, added António Branco.
The petition resulted from a meeting of researchers in March in Galicia, called Propor, at the 16th International Conference on the Computational Processing of Portuguese.
“As a result of the progress of AI, and Language Technology in particular, we are facing the unprecedented promises and challenges of a civilizational transformation induced by a technological shock the scope of which has never been experienced before,” write the authors, pointing out that “no area of human activity will be immune to this technological shock.”
If the technological intermediation of the Portuguese language “continues to be ensured only by a small number of technological giants, this tapered dependence will induce unprecedented risks and limitations to communication between speakers, digital citizenship and cultural autonomy”, the manifesto reads.
For this reason, the authors advocate a plan defined by political decision-makers that takes “advantage of the international projection of Portuguese as a multicentric global language and its coexistence with other languages in the Ibero-American, African and global space, including indigenous languages and Galician, as well as border and exchange languages”.
