When Machines Learn Our Languages Before Our Tamariki Do

What happens when machines learn our languages before our tamariki (children) do — and it’s wrong?

We live in a time where artificial intelligence can translate, transcribe, and even mimic voices faster than our children can speak their first words in te reo Māori. On the surface, it looks like a progress in a digital way to preserve language and culture.

But when those translations are inaccurate, detached from tikanga, or stripped of cultural context, something more profound is lost. The reo may survive in code, but the heart of it, the feeling, the rhythm, the whakapapa begins to fade.

Language isn’t just data; it carries our stories, our identity, our worldview. When machines learn our words but not their meanings, they recreate our culture in fragments — a version that sounds familiar but no longer holds its truth.

The real challenge isn’t whether AI can learn our language. It’s whether we can teach them to understand the why behind our words. Because without that understanding, technology becomes another tool that rewrites who we are, instead of helping us remember.

As we move deeper into an AI-driven world, we need to ask:

• Who teaches the machines?

• Whose version of the story are they learning?

• And what happens when that version becomes the one our tamariki inherit?

Our reo, our stories, and our future are too important to leave behind or leave to chance.

The responsibility to teach, protect, and guide our language belongs to us, not the machines.