It’s a cultural norm for Māori to mihi or greet people with a ‘Kia ora’ or other salutation. This is done in person, written communications, and over the recent years in online video.
In the early 2000’s, when email was relatively new, many Māori would include several sentences to a paragraph of mihimihi in each email. This was done as it was against our cultural norms to send a written form of communication. The alternatives were to ring or to physically see the person face to face to correspond your message.
With the recent introduction of online AI tools such as ChatGPT, it is not unusual for Māori to say “Kia ora” to the AI. They may thank the AI for the outputs by saying things such as ‘ngā mihi’. There are also multiple reports of people forming friendships. Others are falling in love with and having a romantic relationship with an AI.
From a Māori culture perspective, as I have written many other times, AI could be considered to have a mauri. It could be considered for legal personhood in New Zealand. AI does use our taonga – Māori Data, and produces a taonga with Māori Data as an output.
In terms of greeting an AI, it is another new cultural norm that Māori either intentionally or through natural attrition stop greeting. Other salutations to AI stop as well.
If you write “Kia ora” and “ngā mihi nui” the next time you are using ChatGPT, you could use as much 40 to 50 millilitres of water, or over 25 times, about 1 litre of water, according to research from the University of California.
According to this media article
Last week, an X user posted: “I wonder how much money OpenAI has lost in electricity costs from people saying ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ to their models.” The post has been viewed 5.7 million times as of press time.”
Altman replied the following day: “Tens of millions of dollars well spent—you never know.”
The cultural implications for Māori and others is that the AI will talk to you the same way you talk to it. Microsoft’s Kurtis Beavers, a director on the design team for Microsoft Copilot, writes about the dilemmas of being polite to an AI. The article is titled “Why Using a Polite Tone with AI Matters.
It is a cultural shift that many Māori will need to adjust to. They will balance being kaitiaki of our environment, Papatūānuku and Tangaroa, etc.
The ethical issues of how we consider and interact with AI will need to be debated. New tikanga will need to be created from our marae. In the meantime, each of us should consciously consider how we use AI. Its impacts on the environment should also be considered.
