The UN Global Dialogue on AI Governance Should Tackle the AI Language Gap

The United Nations will host the Global Dialogue on AI Governance on July 6-7 in Geneva to address various AI policy issues.
The Dialogue provides an opportunity to focus on multilingual artificial intelligence (AI) due to the under-representation of low-resource languages in AI systems.
Low-resource languages suffer in AI because current AI systems are less accessible, useful, and safe for their users due to limited digitized data for these languages.
There is economic and geopolitical advantage favoring the development of AI optimized for a small set of dominant and well-resourced languages.
The current imbalance created by this ‘language gap’ in AI systems results in both a socio-economic inequity and an accumulation of advantage for those with access to frontier AI over time.
The upcoming Dialogue in Geneva is an opportune platform to generate political momentum, prioritize research and development in multilingual AI, and strategize on using policy levers to influence AI innovation in ways that better benefit users of low-resource languages.
The Dialogue has the potential to create political will and bargaining power to reframe multilingual AI as an urgent policy issue and drive progress in addressing these global disparities caused by AI’s ‘language gap’.