When Artificial Intelligence meets Ancestral Intelligence

While the AI wave threatens to break upon the world, many are expressing realistic fears and doubts. However, mātauranga Māori (the Māori worldview) is robust and has not only survived but thrived under challenge before. Kane Milne and Hirini Kaa explore. 

Dr Hirini Kaa reflects on mātauranga and its resilience in the face of technology: 

Literacy was both a blessing and a curse for our tīpuna. It was such a powerful tool, enabling the spread of information and ideas, magnifying our ancient deep and sophisticated modes of communication. We took our traditional forms such as whaikōrero and utilised literacy to spread the kōrero far and wide, as Tā Timoti Karetu notes, far beyond the confines of the marae. (Karetu 2002) Jane McRae describes the early and extensive use of literacy by Māori as ‘an exchange between traditions rather than a replacement of them’ (McCrae 2002).  

And yet literacy was weaponised against us. It was the heart of an education system that sought to replace our mātauranga with that of the colonisers. It was a key site of cultural contestation. Kuni Jenkins asserts that the pedagogy around literacy was designed so that Māori would become ‘uncritical, mystified, passive readers with a non-empowered view of their changing world’ and that ‘while it held various promises, Māori print literacy was of greater benefit to the colonisers.’ (Jenkins 1991) 

Yet, embrace it we did. Our literacy rates were stupendous, reflected in the printing of early works in te reo Māori and the documented demand that it created. In terms of its impact on our thinking, literacy’s ability to introduce powerful new ideas certainly created transformation within our mātauranga, particularly with the influence of Christian missions’ printing and the impact of Christianity. But rather than be zero-sum in our approach to this, our tīpuna had agency in their intellectual endeavours. Tā Hirini Moko Mead notes our ability to discern and channel transformation: ‘within the basket of knowledge itself, some ideas are held to be crucial and critical, while other ideas are subject to amendment or better left alone, and there is a wide range of new ideas to select from and to embrace.’ (Mead 2012) 

And Michael Stevens furthers this thinking noting ‘the danger of simply equating cultural change with cultural loss… is a failure to understand the nature, extent and drivers of cultural alterations, and their place in Māori modernities.’ (Stevens, 2010). In other words, we grappled with this new technology and found a place for it in our worldview.  

Kane Milne on our need to understand generative AI to uphold our kaitiakitanga 

While AI as it has become known in everyday language, it is Generative Artificial Intelligence (Gen-AI) that exploded into our collective consciousness in 2022 with the release of ChatGPT. Much has been written about the explosion of Gen-AI, but the fact that in just four years we cannot go a day without being exposed to or interact with some form of Gen-AI says a lot about its spread into mainstream life. Can a technology alter a cultural perspective, or does that perspective, or worldview guide our engagement with technologies? The introduction of the guitar into Māori life has had a significant impact on our culture, but our worldview has dictated how it is treated as a technology, or in many whānau and on the Matatini stage, as a taonga.  
 
As much as our culture may be seen to be of another time, it has adapted and grown just as we have as a people. Professor George Dei states that ‘Indigenous knowledges are living and breathing in the present’ (Dei, 2016) but the foundations of this knowledge, our worldview, persists. Just as we have engaged with written literacy, we have taken to Generative AI. We see Gen-AI imagery of Māori with moko-like tattoos in social media, we can sign up to Gen-AI websites to teach us Te Reo and get ChatGPT to create a mihi with very little context.  
 
The challenge we now face is one of sovereignty. Do we own our mātauranga, or more appropriately, are we still kaitiaki? This isn’t an Artificial Intelligence issue per se. For years we have been sharing our lives on social media, engage as academics and professionals sharing our whakaaro with the world, and uploading our digital lives to the cloud. But the World does not abide by our tikanga, and the rise of Generative Artificial Intelligence has highlighted that.

Not only have the Tech Giants taken our knowledge and monetised its access, but we have no guaranteed right to that knowledge. It’s not hosted in Aotearoa, and a recent US Government directive to AI company Anthropic shows that we have no control over the tools, let alone the knowledge that is stored by these companies. As Dr Karaitiana Taiuru states, “AI capability is a US-controlled resource”. Access to the tools and sovereignty over the data are distinct issues, but the solutions may be the same. And it starts with a new type of literacy, AI literacy.  

 We need to have the same level of understanding of what happens to the ones and zeros of the digital world, as we have of the water and earth of the natural world. We need to be able to apply our guiding tikanga to how we engage with, share and create with AI. We need to understand how it works, and apply a critical lens to what AI generates, and have the forums for open discussion as the capabilities of AI develop, and kaitutū push more boundaries. At the same time, we could be creating our own, small data centres, serving iwi as we work to reclaim our role as kaitiaki of our mātauranga, not for ourselves, but for our mokopuna.  

Further Reading: 

Dr Karaitiana Taiuru, Māori Data Sovereignty and the Fragility of Borrowed AI, Māori Data Sovereignty and the Fragility of Borrowed AI - Taiuru & Associates Ltd 

Jenifer Curnow, Ngapare Hopa, and Jane McRae eds, Rere Atu, Taku Manu! Discovering History, Language and Politics in the Māori-Language Newspapers, 2002.