Artificial intelligence chat bots can now write in te reo Māori and even compose karakia or prayer if prompted.
But experts warn the technology could be doing more harm than good when it comes to ensuring the future of the language.
"This is the most scary thing about it. It's a form of colonisation," Waikato University computer science expert associate professor Te Taka Keegan said.
"This overseas entity is telling us how our language should be. It shouldn't tell us that. Māori people should tell us that."
ChatGPT, a chat bot people can access online or on their mobile devices, is owned by American company OpenAI.
It has the ability to write complete essays, poems, and emails in te reo.
"It looks really cool but ultimately its a colonised version of our language because its saying, 'from my perspective, this is the right answer'. And as Māori, we are quite happy to have lots of different perspectives for the same answer," Keegan said.
Technology ethicist Karaitiana Taiuru said the reo capability of these technologies would likely only get better.
"I think they are very powerful and I think they'll one day replace Māori language teachers and Māori language resources," he said.
"I say that because ChatGPT learnt from patterns, we can already see it learnt English very well.
"We have the issue that these conglomerates could use our language, and assign incorrect meanings or mispronunciations and totally change the reo as we know it today."
More than 80% of the data ChatGPT is using to learn te reo is taken from the internet.
"Every time you post a comment in te reo Māori on Facebook, that's available to be clawed... It's available to be misappropriated and that's what's happened," Keegan said.
"This data is in a large international company and Māori don't have any control over it."
Once they get control of Māori data, they can then profit off it, he said.
"OpenAI is projected to make a billion dollars profit next year... none of that profit is going back to Māori, none of it is going back to us to revitalise the language."
But Kaitaia-based company Te Hiku Media is changing the game when it comes to artificial intelligence.
It's a Māori radio station that's taking its fight to revitalise te reo Māori to new heights, using the technology to create Māori language learning tools of it own.
That includes an app called Rongo, which helps people learn the correct pronunciation of Māori words.
"Our approach as an organisation has always been applying Māori values, tikanga, in collecting data and applying that to how we look after it.
"Te Hiku Media doesn't claim ownership over the data it collects, rather it claims to be the kaitiaki, or guardians, of the data we are in possession of," Keoni Mahelona said.
The company only uses data from those who given them consent.
"When we gather data we don't take it and ask people to opt out. We take a privacy first approach and we always ask people permission, rather than forgiveness," Mahelona said.
"Iwi radio have been collecting Māori stories since the legislation was signed in 1989. Those stories, those archives, are embedded with so much mātauranga or knowledge and so much language, and we see something like speech transcription as a way to accelerate our process in digitising and making these archives accessible."
Taking the control out of the hands of overseas companies is the key to ensuring Māori data sovereignty remains intact, Keegan said.
"How can we use AI to our benefit? That's how. We cut it off from the mother-ship, we feed it our own data that we control, and we have sovereignty over that data.
"That's where we need to go. That's how we prevent further colonisation."
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