A Māori Speech Synthesizer Built to Resist ChatGPT and Claude Scraping

Professor Te Taka Keegan and his team have built a speech synthesizer for the Waikato-Maniapoto dialect of Māori. The model was trained on 7 hours 45 minutes of recordings of a female teacher and reached 93% accuracy. The key difference: the voice and all the technology remain under the full control of the Māori community, not Big Tech.

AI-processed from IEEE Spectrum AI; edited by Hamidun News
A Māori Speech Synthesizer Built to Resist ChatGPT and Claude Scraping
Source: IEEE Spectrum AI. Collage: Hamidun News.
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The Māori community of New Zealand has built its own speech synthesizer, protected from scraping by ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, which were trained on Māori data without permission.

Why did the Māori build their own speech synthesizer?

ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity were trained on Māori text and audio collected without permission. The Māori created their own synthesizer to control the language and how it is used, ensuring digital sovereignty.

Which neural networks were trained on the

Māori language without permission? ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity were trained on Māori text and audio scraped without asking the Māori community.

How did ChatGPT and Claude learn to speak Māori?

They were trained on data from Māori communities: text and audio that was scraped without the consent or permission of its authors.

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Key Questions Answered

Why did the Māori build their own speech synthesizer?

ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity were trained on Māori text and audio collected without permission. The Māori created their own synthesizer to control the language and how it is used, ensuring digital sovereignty.

Which neural networks were trained on the Māori language without permission?

ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity were trained on Māori text and audio scraped without asking the Māori community.

How did ChatGPT and Claude learn to speak Māori?

They were trained on data from Māori communities: text and audio that was scraped without the consent or permission of its authors.

ZK
Zhemal Khamidun — CPO at Alpina Digital, product manager of AlpinaGPT. Building AI products since 2019. Hamidun News is a pet project that grew into a production aggregator with 6,000+ readers.
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