In his spare time, Joseph Windsor, a theoretical linguist at the University of Calgary, is an enthusiastic “conlanger”—someone who constructs entirely new languages, such as the alien tongues used in science fiction movies and fantasy novels. It’s a time-consuming craft that requires both rigor and creativity, he says: constructing a coherent set of grammatical rules but also inventing novel words that strike just the right tone. “Grammar can tell you whether and where a word belongs,” Windsor says. “It cannot tell you whether it feels right.”
Now, an artificial intelligence (AI) system that can construct new languages is fueling debate over the role of human creativity in language construction—and whether an AI conlanger can replicate that imaginative leap.
That ongoing discussion, most recently at last week’s Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, centers on an AI tool built on large language models (LLMs) known as ConlangCrafter. The researchers who built ConlangCrafter “wanted to harness AI’s ability to make up things to create these completely new—and sometimes wonderfully strange—alien languages that we might not have come up with ourselves,” says Gašper Beguš, a computational linguist at the University of California Berkeley, who led the team. They also wanted to explore whether AI-crafted languages could help reveal how LLMs reason—and whether that reasoning produces genuinely original ideas or simply spits out a sophisticated remix.
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