Artificial intelligence is creating a new global linguistic hierarchy

Understand

Artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform healthcare, education, governance and socioeconomic equity, but its benefits remain concentrated in a small number of languages (Bender, 2019; Blasi et al., 2022; Joshi et al., 2020; Ranathunga and de Silva, 2022; Young, 2015).

• Language AI - the technologies that underpin widely-used conversational systems such as ChatGPT - could provide major benefits if available in people's native languages, yet most of the world's 7,000+ linguistic communities currently lack access and face persistent digital marginalization.
• Here we present a global longitudinal analysis of social, economic and infrastructural conditions across languages to assess systemic inequalities in language AI.
• We first analyze the existence of AI resources for 6003 languages.