International
The director of the RAE asks to take care of Spanish in AI so that they do not create their own dialects
The director of the Royal Spanish Academy (RAE) and president of the Association of Academies of the Spanish Language (Asale), Santiago Muñoz Machado, called for taking care of the development of artificial intelligence (AI) so that machines speak Spanish in the most correct way possible and at the same time prevent their algorithms from creating digital dialects that would constitute “a great break for the unity of the language”.
“It is important that machines, which are a growing number of non-human individuals who use our language, do so in the best possible way,” Muñoz Machado said in an interview with EFE during the celebration in Quito of the XVII Congress of the Asale, in which issues such as the challenges and opportunities of Spanish in the face of new technologies and the digital world will be discussed.
The Spanish jurist considered that for this there is “a competitive advantage: none of the technology companies that have machines that speak is interested in speaking badly, in the same way that no school or university is interested in having students who do not handle the language well.”
“Large technology companies are not interested in having illiterate people. To help them not have them, what we tell them is that, when they teach the machines to speak Spanish, they use the tools of the language academies, and in that way the machines will speak a language just like that of humans,” explained Muñoz Machado.
Spanish and AI
The director of the RAE admitted that, for the moment, they have not detected major deviations in artificial intelligence, with respect to the canon that the academies establish.
“(But) we must take care of this and that it remains so, because it would be feasible for the algorithms that handle artificial intelligence to determine variations of the language that would ultimately create digital dialects of artificial intelligence, not unintelligible from the common Spanish language,” warned Muñoz Machado.
“That would be a great breakdown of the unity of the language and an unbearable injury to a language that they speak now and with which 600 million people understand. It would be very serious if it happened, but I think there is no will or interest in it happening, not even economically,” he concluded.
In that sense, he emphasized that the scenario that these machines could create languages derived from Spanish, as well as other languages, that only they understood is not science fiction, because “everything that comes out in this matter is happening now.”
AI to detect new words
The jurist, who has directed the RAE since 2018, recalled that in the previous Asale congress, held in 2019 in Seville (Spain), the Spanish Language and Artificial Intelligence (LEIA) project was already created.
“In recent years we have had great revolutions that can affect the tools we use for the general regulation of the language, especially the digital revolution and artificial intelligence. We have opened up to them immediately,” he said.
Thus, they have also seen with AI an opportunity to use this technology to detect new terms and forms of expression that arise and that do not reach them through traditional channels.
The digital revolution has also led to the appearance of new words to name elements or phenomena that did not exist before, most Anglo-Saxon terms that do not generate fear in the academies of the Spanish language.
A mixed language
“It is not a great tragedy because Spanish has always been mestizo, a language very given to incorporating terms from other languages from its origins. He already incorporated many Arabic words and other neighboring languages. And in countries like the Americans it has terms of their original languages,” Muñoz Machado said.
“We’re not too worried. The ‘Dictionary of the Spanish Language’ has 94,000 entries and 189,000 meanings. Every year we incorporate a maximum of a dozen new terms from English, and we also incorporate them raw, without Castilianizing or Spanishizing them, in the same way they mean in English. We enrich the language in that way and nothing happens,” he added.
However, the director of the RAE emphasized that “a different thing is to use English expressions that have equivalent in Spanish only for snobbery or to show a certain knowledge of that culture in an unnecessary and harmful way for the quality and integrity of our language”
At the Asale congress, among other novelties, a ‘Pan-Hispanic Guide to Clear Language’ will also be presented, with the aim that the official communications of the institutions can be understood by any citizen and that they can thus exercise “the right to understand,” as Muñoz Machado defined it, “which is the basis of the exercise of other rights.”
International
Austrian man arrested in Croatia with deceased woman as passenger in his car
A 65-year-old Austrian citizen was arrested at a border checkpoint in Croatia after attempting to enter the country in his car with a deceased woman sitting as a passenger, police announced on Tuesday.
The man was detained in a routine check in late November in Gunja, a border area separating Bosnia from Croatia, the police told AFP. Suspicious because they saw “no consciousness or movement” from the passenger, Croatian officers called a doctor, who confirmed the death of the 83-year-old woman, also Austrian, according to her identification.
The woman’s relationship to the suspect is unknown. She had died in Bosnia, and the man intended to repatriate her body to Austria to “avoid the formalities related to transporting a corpse,” according to the police. Croatian media reported that the man was her legal guardian.
Once her death was confirmed, a funeral service took charge of the body.
International
Colombian nationals arrested for human trafficking and disappearance of migrant boat
Colombian authorities arrested two nationals accused of the illegal trafficking of migrants to the United States and of endangering lives due to the disappearance of a boat with 40 people aboard, U.S. Department of Justice officials reported on Tuesday.
Hernando Manuel de la Cruz Rivera Orjuela, 52, and Luis Enrique Linero Pinto, 40, both Colombian citizens, were arrested on December 13 in Colombia at the request of the United States for their alleged involvement in a “transnational human trafficking operation,” the department said in a statement.
According to the charges, the detainees were transporting migrants to San Andrés Island in the Caribbean, where they would then be taken by boat to Nicaragua. The goal was to reach the United States through Central America and Mexico.
The accused are said to have advised the migrants on how to reach San Andrés Island, where they personally received them, arranged accommodations, and “took them to the boats that transported them to Nicaragua so they could enter the United States illegally,” the statement reads.
“These defendants put several migrants on the boat that disappeared off the coast of Nicaragua in 2023,” said Deputy Attorney General Nicole M. Argentieri, head of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Criminal Division, as cited in the statement.
Both men are “directly and personally responsible for the illicit trafficking of migrants on that vessel,” according to the indictment dated October 23.
International
Homemade landmine explosion in Michoacán kills two soldiers, injures five
Two soldiers were killed and five others were injured by the explosion of homemade landmines planted by a criminal group in a mountainous area of the Mexican state of Michoacán (west), the Secretary of Defense reported on Tuesday.
The attack occurred on Monday morning in the municipality of Cotija, a border area between Michoacán and the state of Jalisco, when the military was conducting a reconnaissance mission after receiving information about an armed camp in the area, explained Secretary General Ricardo Trevilla.
“At that moment, an improvised explosive device detonated. Unfortunately, two soldiers lost their lives, and five others were injured,” the military leader detailed. The affected soldiers were airlifted to hospitals in the region by a military helicopter, while the rest of the team continued with the reconnaissance of the area.
Trevilla stated that before the explosion, the military unit had located the dismembered bodies of three people, and upon continuing the mission, they confirmed the camp was abandoned.
Asked about the individuals responsible for placing the explosives, the general suggested they could be criminals linked to the local group Cárteles Unidos, which operates in Michoacán and uses these tactics in their territorial dispute with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, one of the most powerful criminal organizations in the country.
Austrian man arrested in Croatia with deceased woman as passenger in his car
Colombian nationals arrested for human trafficking and disappearance of migrant boat
Homemade landmine explosion in Michoacán kills two soldiers, injures five
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