There’s plenty of warranted anxiety about the effect artificial intelligence (AI) will have on social and economic inequality.

AI built by big tech firms is set to reward capital owners at the expense of workers. Technologically advanced countries will benefit, at the expense of low-income countries.

But might AI also be driving linguistic inequality? After all, generative AI chatbots are powered by large language models. These aren’t trained only in English, but there’s a great divide between which languages get included, and which do not.

Generative AI works best on majority languages, making minority languages – ones with very little representation online – less relevant. Hula, in Papua New Guinea, has around 10,000 speakers. Tetun, the lingua franca of Timor-Leste, has just over 1 million speakers.

Both represent a tiny fraction of AI model training data, and as such are very likely to be misrepresented in the output, if they show up at all.

On the other hand, we’ve observed another trend over the past year. AI can also be an enabler, letting local knowledge owners build the tools they envision for their community.

Community tools, with a little help from AI

One such tool is Vavanagi, a language documentation platform for the Hula language in Papua New Guinea. It was built entirely by and for the Hula community, with coding help from AI.

With around 10,000 speakers, the Hula community lacks the workforce – such as linguists and software engineers –........

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