Book presentation addresses AI and written Cypriot Greek

A book presentation coming up at Thinker Maker Space in Nicosia on Thursday presents a collection of poetry and prose, linguistic creations resulting from the collaboration between nine writers and AI, exploring the question ‘what defines a human being?’.

The book APOapoikioPOISI: Glossoplasmata pou michanes tzai plasmata is presented by the NGO Ypogeia Skini, in collaboration with linguist Spyros Armostis and artist Alexia Achilleos. It is the result of a nearly year-long investigation into the issues of colonialism/decolonisation, in a historical as well as a technological context.

Nine Cypriot writers were trained by the linguist Spyros Armostis to write in Cypriot Greek (CyGr), in a homogenised manner. Over a period of four months, the writers created a corpus of written CyGr, which was used to train GPT-2, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) Natural Language Processing model.

The book also includes two accompanying essays which provide a wider political context to the project. Alexia Achilleos covers some main ethical issues in AI and technological colonialism, and analyses the steps taken in this project in an attempt to propose an alternative, decolonial approach. Armostis’ essay analyses the project from a linguist’s perspective, focusing on the naturalness of the linguistic output of the AI model and how that became the source of inspiration of the nine writers interacting with it. In his essay, he also presents the orthographic choices we made for the written rendition of CyGr on the basis of grapholinguistic criteria.

“In addition to a homogenised writing system,” says the team, “and the writing tools we provided the CyGr-speaking community with, such as a CyGr spell checker and a CyGr keyboard, we propose a model for codifying the writing system of Cypriot Greek, which could be easily adopted by many to help towards the linguistic decolonisation of Cyprus, which is directly linked to its colonised past.”

Book Presentation

With linguist Spyros Armostis and artist Alexia Achilleos. February 23. Thinker Maker Space, Nicosia. 6.30pm-8.30pm. In Greek-Cypriot. Free. Registration needed. www.makerspace.cyens.org.cy