Efforts to use AI to produce children's books in Bambara and other local languages are gaining momentum as relations between Mali and French, the language of former colonial power France, sour. Amid rising political tensions between the two countries, Mali's military junta last year replaced French as the country's “official language,” elevating Bambara and 12 other native languages in its place, but not in government offices or public schools. French will continue to be used.
The change means there is more political will behind initiatives such as startup RobotMari, which has created more than 140 books using artificial intelligence in Bambara since last year. , works for Mali's Ministry of Education and helps produce the RobotsMali book. Now, he said, both the government and the people “want to learn and value local languages.”
RobotsMali uses AI to create stories that reflect the lives and culture of ordinary Malians. Rather than simply translating French classics like The Little Prince into Bambara, the team at RobotsMali has included prompts in ChatGPT like “Tell me the pranks kids do.” .
The team, whose research was first reported by Rest of World, removed examples that were irrelevant to most children in Mali, then added Google Translate (which added Bambara in 2022) and AI to improve translations. ) was used to perform the first round. translation. Experts like Tognine will correct your mistakes. Another staff member uses various AI image creators to illustrate the story and make the characters empathetic to Mali's children, then utilizes ChatGPT to create reading comprehension tests.
The dozen or so students sitting in Safo's classroom had either dropped out of public school or had never attended school, but they followed the teacher's guidance to waste food and bully their siblings. , children were reading stories about things not to do. Talk back to adults. At various points, the instructor invited individual students to read aloud, and the students read enthusiastically, sometimes gently correcting each other.
Soko Coulibaly, a quiet 10-year-old who had never been to school and now sits in the front row and follows with his fingers, said he was “a little scared” when he first saw Bambara in the movie. Told. He put it in writing, thinking, “How do I do this?”
However, after a few lessons, she found it easier to decipher the words she was used to speaking at home and began bringing books home to her mother. Her mother is one of the 70 percent of Malians who have never learned to read or write. .
Challenge to African languages
Most of Africa's approximately 1,000 languages are It is represented on websites that large generative AI platforms like ChatGPT crawl to train themselves.
For example, asking ChatGPT the most basic question in Ethiopia's two most popular languages, Amharic and Tigrinya, produces a meaningless jumble of Amharic, Tigrinya, and sometimes other languages. said Asmerash Teka Hadug. But Hadu, who founded a startup focused on using machine learning to translate between English and Ethiopian, says specific projects like Robot Mali also speak to the potential of artificial intelligence. said.
“If done correctly, it has great potential in terms of democratizing access to education,” he said.
Nate Allen, an associate professor at the Washington-based Africa Center for Strategic Studies, said that while the United States and China are “certainly at the forefront” of artificial intelligence technology, efforts like Mali's efforts “are a sign that we are living in He said that this shows that the The era of AI accessibility. ”
On a recent day, as the RobotsMali team worked in an office in a wing of co-founder Michael Leventhal's home in Bamako, one Ministry of Education official corrected a Google Translate Bambara translation, and another was querying Playground, a free online image. Creator, photo of “African woman pounding millet”. Leventhal studied the AI-generated photos of fathers and daughters and wondered whether, as is often the case, the images made African men look too stereotypically muscular.
Torgnain, who started working with RobotMari after taking AI training conducted by the group, said the program has made the ministry's operations more efficient. “There are a lot of things to fix, but translations that used to take weeks or months are done in seconds,” he says, noting that he has already produced two books that week alone. added.
Previous efforts by the Malian government to introduce Bambara into public schools have been hampered by a lack of funding, teacher training and parental interest in having their children learn a language other than French at school, Tognain said. Therefore, it almost ended in failure.
However, he said that in recent years it has become increasingly important to learn how to read and write the national language, which has traditionally been the main language spoken, partly because the government has rejected France and is emphasizing national sovereignty.
“It enriches our cultural and linguistic history,” said Bakari Sahogo, another member of the Ministry of Education working with Robotomali, writing in Bambara and other local languages. He talked about the importance of things. “and [it] We can protect and develop our culture. ”
Building a tradition with stronger characters
Leventhal, who worked as a technology entrepreneur in Silicon Valley before moving to Mali to teach computer science 10 years ago, said his ultimate goal is to leverage artificial intelligence to help Mali become what it is today. He said the aim was to develop a stronger Bambara written tradition. That could happen as artificial intelligence systems have access to more linguistic data, he said.
But for now, the focus is on efforts like Safo's. At Safo, none of the children in the program knew how to read until Robot Mali started a nine-week program here in January. By April, when funding from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation ran out and the program ended, 10 of the 11 children could read at least at a basic level, Leventhal said.
The other day, when teacher Nuhum Coulibaly handed out copies of a new book, the children remained focused despite the 110-degree temperatures.
Bourama Diallo, 14, was always nervous at her all-French public school. Now, he said, he realizes he loves learning.
Coulibaly, a quiet 10-year-old who has started bringing books home to her mother, said her favorite books are about animals, or “bagans” in Bambara. She hopes the program will resume, she said. Leventhal said the group has returned several times after the program ended to deliver new books to children, and plans to restart as soon as new funding is raised, she said.
Coulibaly said she had never seen a computer before the program began, but was fascinated when staff explained how the stories were created.
“You can make all kinds of things with computers,” she said with a smile. “They know a lot about the world.”
