Carmen Naranjo
Cádiz (EFE).- Artificial intelligence (AI) cannot speak only in English and that is why technology companies and the Royal Academy of the Spanish Language have opted for the development of the LEIA (Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence) project, whose objective that the machines speak good Spanish.
Heads of Amazon, Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google, Meta, Microsoft and Telefónica met at the beginning of the week with King Felipe VI and the director and president of the Association of Spanish Language Academies (ASALE), Santiago Muñoz Machado, in Cádiz, on the first day of the IX Congress of the Spanish Language to talk about the main challenges facing Spanish in the face of artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence has undergone a paradigm shift in the last three years, moving from reasoning about data of numbers to reasoning about human language, explained David Carmona, general director of Artificial Intelligence and Innovation at Microsoft.
Changing Algorithms in AI
This is a very important change, “since algorithms can be used to help us reason about human knowledge, with the possibility of creating a union between man and machine to take any domain of humanity to a new level,” he explains. Carmona.
It is a kind of “co-pilot” that will help from daily tasks, to work, scientific research or treatment of diseases, indicates the Microsoft expert: “This means that now more than ever the language is more important, since it is in the heart of the AI”.
“That is why it is essential that the Spanish join this great revolution,” he said. It is no longer necessary to be a data scientist, but AI is used with language asking for what we want, as is the case with ChatPGT.
The “principles” are fundamental when developing AI, Carmona maintains, and it would be necessary for it not to depend on technology companies but rather to be regulated for all of them, to be decided in each country or jointly.
Integrate the dictionary of the RAE so that Artificial Intelligence speaks better Spanish
With the RAE they try to make Artificial Intelligence speak better Spanish, integrating the dictionary of the Royal Academy in search engines and that there are no gender or other biases.
A pilot project is the one developed by Amazon Web Service with the RAE, according to Antonio Vargas, director of institutional relations for the company. This is an analysis of 8 million documents to study the quality of the Spanish used on the internet, detect the use of foreign words, lexical richness or the most common linguistic errors.
The next step is to get the AI to speak Spanish, programming more in this language that unites 500 million native speakers.
And “it is not a matter of time but of political will” to program more and more in Spanish instead of English, maintains Vargas, who considers that Artificial Intelligence is currently dominated by that language.
Miguel Escassi, Director of Public and Institutional Affairs at Google Spain, has insisted on the need to eliminate biases and stereotypes in the language of AI, a responsibility that they carry out through a decalogue.
The meeting with the king was also attended by the director of the Cervantes Institute, Luis García Montero, and the directors and presidents of the academies of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (ASALE).