Icelandic is in danger of dying out because of AI and English-language media, says former PM | Iceland

IFormer prime minister of Celand, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, said that the Icelandic language could be destroyed in as little as one generation due to the rapid rise of artificial intelligence and the increasing dominance of the English language.

Katrín, who left the prime ministership last year after seven years in office and is running for president, said Iceland had undergone a “radical” change in language use. More people read and speak English, fewer read Icelandic; This trend, he says, is exacerbated by the way language models are trained.

He made the comments before attending the Iceland Noir crime fiction festival in Reykjavík, following the surprise release of his second novel in the genre, written with Ragnar Jónasson.

“Many languages ​​are disappearing and many values ​​are dying with them[and] “There’s a lot of human thought,” he said. Icelandic is spoken by just 350,000 people and is among the least changed languages ​​in the world.

“Because we have this language that is spoken by so few people, I feel like we have a huge responsibility to really preserve it. I personally don’t think we’re doing enough to do that,” he said, especially since young people in Iceland are “absolutely surrounded by material in English, social media and other media.”

Iceland has been “quite proactive” in making AI available in Icelandic, Katrín said. Earlier this month, Anthropic announced a partnership with the Icelandic ministry of education, one of the world’s first national AI training pilots. The partnership is a nationwide pilot across Iceland, giving hundreds of teachers across Iceland access to AI tools.

Katrín said that during her time in government, they were able to see the “threats and dangers of artificial intelligence” and the importance of ensuring that Icelandic texts and books are used to train AI.

Its co-author, Ragnar Jónasson, agrees that the language is in grave danger. “With all these big changes, we’re only one generation away from losing this language,” he said.

“They read more in English, they get information from the internet, on their phones, and children in Iceland sometimes speak English among themselves.”

Referring to what happened during the period when Iceland was under Danish rule until 1918, when the Icelandic language was subject to Danish influence, Katrín said that changes could happen “very quickly”.

“We’ve seen this before here in Iceland, because of course we were under Danish rule for a long time and the Danish language had a lot of influence on the Icelandic language.”

But this change was quickly reversed by a strong movement by Icelanders, he added.

“Perhaps we need a stronger movement right now to talk about why we want to preserve the language? That’s the most important thing we need to talk about here in Iceland,” he said, adding that “the fate of a nation” can be determined by how it treats its language, as language shapes the way people think.

He said that while there were “incredible opportunities” that AI could offer, it presented huge challenges to writers and the creative industry as a whole.

He previously thought the presence of human authors was important to readers, but after discovering that humans were forming relationships with AI, he was no longer so sure.

“We are going through very challenging times and my personal opinion is that governments need to focus very much on the development of artificial intelligence.”

Amidst all this change and talk of AI dominance, Katrín hopes her new book, which rose to the top of the charts in Iceland and is set in 1989 in Fáskrúðsfjörður, a remote village in eastern Iceland, will connect with readers on a human level.

On research trips, the authors spoke to villagers who worked in the Icelandic media in the 1980s to gain background information on their protagonist, the journalist.

“I hope this is something that people experience as something authentic and from the heart,” he said.

For Katrín, reading and writing have always been therapeutic. “When you read about others, you learn to have more empathy, you understand yourself better,” he said.