Neither sun nor beach, nor olive oil, nor wine. Spain's true asset is Spanish. The language of Cervantes is the mother tongue of 6.2% of the world's population. About 500 million people speak it, second only to Mandarin Chinese. “It cannot be said where better Spanish is spoken, because there is not one Castilian, but many,” said the Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. “The richness and linguistic diversity of Spanish are fascinating aspects of this global language,” he answers that question without getting too wet with ChatGPT, OpenAI's technology.
Yes, as Mariano Jabonero, secretary of the Organization of Ibero-American States, says: “Language determines the position of a country in many places and also in geopolitics.” It would not be trivial to take into consideration the influence of artists like Bad Bunny, a Puerto Rican singer second only to the phenomenon Taylor Swift, and whose album 'A summer without you' has been the most listened to on Spotify. The Spanish song has been played thanks to this artist a total of 13.5 million times.
And our mother tongue is an economic engine where the world population that speaks it has a purchasing capacity of around 10% of the world's GDP. In Spain it contributes 16% of the value of GDP and employment and, in the cultural industry alone, it represents around 3% of GDP. “Culture is language,” says Jabonero.
The per capita income of Spanish speakers would amount to almost 21,000 euros, although the forecast for the coming decades is that it will decrease due to the emergence of new technologies. And this despite the fact that Spanish is the third most spoken language on the internet and the second most used language on social networks.
However, these new technological tools are understood more with Shakespeare's language than with Cervantes'. “Spanish is behind English because, obviously, this technology is being developed by large technology companies and they are American,” says Asunción Gómez-Pérez, a full member of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE), with a degree in Computer Science from the Polytechnic University of Madrid and PhD in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence.
New models
And it is despite Spanish efforts to try not to lose the tailwind of these new language models that are presented as one of the great revolutions on the internet. MarIA and LuzIA are the names of the national bets that are trying to stand up to Bard, ChatGPT, oSocratic, among others.
The Internet is entering a new era in which “search engines do not locate where the content is that, apparently, best fits what we ask,” describes Senén Barro, professor of Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence and scientific director of the CiTIUS of the University of Santiago de Compostela. “Now they don't search, they build an answer from enormous amounts of information,” he adds. “Without language there is no AI, it is its main raw material,” Jabonero recalled during his speech at the Future of Spanish Forum recently organized by the newspaper La Rioja.
MarIA has been trained with 135,733,450,668 words from millions of web pages collected by the National Library. “The texts that are used are very important,” details Gómez-Pérez. “If only the Official State Gazette is used, it will speak like the BOE and if it only does so with rude phrases, it will use those words,” he details.
In the case of MarIA, it was necessary to perform a screening to eliminate all text fragments that were not “well-formed language” and thus correctly train the AI. “We have to preserve the languages,” says Puyol.x
LEIA as protector
Despite his name, George Lucas has not become the Spanish's faithful squire in artificial intelligence. LEIA is the acronym for Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence whose mission is to protect and defend the good use of the language in new technologies. “AI speaks English, fundamentally, and we have to ensure that, little by little, Spanish takes an eminent position,” warned Santiago Muñoz Machado, director of the RAE and president of ASALE, in the presentation of this project. “We are at a crucial moment in which we have to do something that our 18th century ancestors did (with humans): standardize the language of machines and artificial intelligence,” he added.
This initiative created by the Royal Spanish Academy is initially promoted together with Telefónica and also has the collaboration of other important technology companies such as Google, Amazon, Microsoft, X and Meta. A joint work that includes collaboration for the development of their voice assistants, word processors, search engines, chatbots, instant messaging systems, social networks and any other resource, as well as to follow the criteria on good use of Spanish approved by the RAE standards.
At its birth, a commitment was also made to make Spanish available as the language of use for its products and services, so that citizens can enjoy, in this language, the benefits offered by artificial intelligence.
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