Indigenous groups in NZ, US fear colonisation as AI learns their languages

April 3 (Thomson Foundation): When U.S. tech firm OpenAI rolled out Whisper, a speech recognition tool offering audio transcription and translation into English for dozens of languages including Maori, it rang alarm bells for many Indigenous New Zealanders.

Whisper, launched in September by the company behind the ChatGPT chatbot, was trained on 680,000 hours of audio from the web, including 1,381 hours of the Maori language.