01/09/2026
๐ฆ๐๐๐ง๐๐๐: ๐ ๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฒ ๐ง๐ต๐ฎ๐ป ๐ช๐ผ๐ฟ๐ฑ๐
Does AI Really Understand Us?
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly used in everyday life, even in classrooms, workplaces, and businesses. Especially on the internet where billions spend hours daily. AI has found its way into something uniquely humanโour language.
AI has officially come to be the inspiration for the Department of Educationโs (DepEd) theme for the celebration of Buwan ng Wika 2026, proving just how much is the importance of technology and connection of it to the Filipino language is. But one question may come to mind: Does AI truly understand our language? How?
At first look, the answer may be a little too obvious. AI can immediately translate words, sentences, paragraphs, and long essays into Filipino. With just a simple prompt and a click of an AI chatbot, a full-on and fluent Pinoy conversation can take place. It may even look like machines do not need to lift a finger to deal with different languages and even converse with it.
However, this is where AI sometimes falls short.
According to Comic (2025), AI translation starts with training a model wherein it will be fed millions of real-world bilingual or multilingual data from websites and books. In this step, it will learn patterns, language structures, and vocabularies across languages.
In this regard, Filipino sources are less common than English sources, with only 0.1% of internet sources in the Filipino language. This lack of Filipino sources can turn into a barrier for AI programs. The less Filipino materials available for training, the more difficult it can be for an AI model to scan and identify the languageโs styles, structures, contexts, and expressions.
One of the most common instances is code-switching, where the AI chatbots switch between two or more languages in a conversation. For our kababayans, using English and Filipino or other local languages of the Philippines in the same sentence is normal. Expressions such as "Wait lang" and โIโm done na" make perfect sense to pinoy speakers. But sometimes AI might interpret or translate these phrases inaccurately, depending on the data it has trained on.
AI may also struggle and have problems with Filipino words that have the same spelling but have different uses, including words such as โbukasโ and "baba" that use emphasis on the pronunciation to express the meaning. Without proper context, the machine can interpret the entire sentence with difficulty. The same struggle comes up with Filipino expressions and idioms that have no direct translation in English. โMagsunog ng kilayโ does not necessarily mean one is burning their eyebrows. The expression commonly means that one is studying hard.
These cases underline that AIโs language processing is not merely translating words and phrases. It is understanding the structures, context, and culture. This becomes even more important in the context of our country, wherein over 180 languages coexist with the Pambansang Wika. AI cannot offer the same level of performance it offers in handling major languages such as English with Philippine languages, considering its limited digital resources.
To sum up, AI may already know how to speak our words, mimic our expressions, and respond in our language, but language is more than data fed into a machine; it is our identity. It is what carries our culture, it is the emblem of our past, it symbolizes our nation, and it is the expression of our experiences, resilience, and unity. AI may master the process, but understanding requires more than knowing; it requires recognizing the people and the culture that gives life to the language.
โ๏ธ Louie Pegarro
๐จ Aloise Bisares
