By: Ebuka Williams Obidinma, Esq., ACIArb.
Earlier this week, I listened to an AI voice speaking Igbo, and I did not even realise it was Igbo! My own mother tongue oh, and I could not recognise it. The words were there, but the tone, the rhythm and the “vibe” that make the language what it is were missing.
That’s not all. Last night, I stumbled upon a video on Instagram with over a million views. Its subtitles had clearly been produced by AI transcription, and they were meant to be in Igbo. Any fluent speaker would easily spot the multiple spelling errors (the words were clearly written as the system perceived them to sound). Yet more than a million people had already seen them.
Both moments stayed with me, because they point to a deeper concern about our culture in the age of AI.
Our languages were once passed down by people: parents, elders, the voices around us. We learned a word, its sound and its meaning together. Today, more and more people, especially the young and people in the diaspora, meet their mother tongue through a screen.
As our elders say: “Arụ gbaa afọ, ọ bụrụ omenala” (When an abomination lasts a year, it becomes tradition). I fear that if AI gets the tone, spelling or pronunciation wrong, people will learn it wrong. In time, the error will become the norm. Then it will become universally accepted, not because anyone wanted it, but because nobody knew any better.
This is not a case against AI. Used well, AI could be one of the greatest allies our languages have ever had. It can preserve the voices of our elders, digitise our stories and proverbs, and carry our mother tongues to places they have never reached.
But AI is only as good as its training data. It is a tool, and it should enhance and promote our culture, not replace or distort it. It is my belief that AI developers and the data scientists who train these models, especially models built for public use, must involve native speakers, linguists, language professionals and custodians of culture. They should also draw on credible sources such as recognised texts and established orthography. A well-trained model will be a gift to our heritage. A poorly trained one will slowly rewrite it.
Our language is our cultural heritage and our identity. If we lose its true sound and form, we lose part of who we are. These errors are still young, and there is still time to correct them. We must act now, because, our elders say, when you act fast, you avoid calamity:
