To parse tribal law, to preserve culture, how Native American tribes are adopting artificial intelligence.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Novosafo. Artificial intelligence holds lots of promise for tribal nations as a force multiplier for a heart-to-staffed departments,

as a tool to better serve tribal citizens, and even to aid in the revitalization of indigenous languages and culture.

But, as with all applications of AI tools, data security concerns

loom. And some tribes are adopting the new technology quicker than others. For an overview,

we spoke with Marketplace as Savannah Peters, who covers tribal economies. One way tribes are

definitely embracing AI is on the enterprise side. I also heard about the Chickasaw Nation's

director of data stewardship talked about an AI-driven citizen portal that's in development, and this is

really useful, especially for a tribe like Chickasaw that has tens of thousands of citizens that may be

scattered across the country, and AI can help create these tools that

shows citizens what services are available for them.

I heard about language departments using AI to create classroom tools and study materials.

Everything I just mentioned are use cases that are actually sanctioned by the tribal governments, usually using lockdown

proprietary models. But I also talk to tribal leaders who say they pretty much know that a lot of

their employees are using open source models like chat GPT on their personal devices to conduct

tribal business. And that comes with some risks.

Yeah, we've talked a lot on the show about those risks.

Help us kind of outline for us some of those risks that the tribal nations are dealing with.

So like any other government, tribes have a lot of sensitive data on their hands.

That includes personal and health data about their

citizens, financial and other proprietary data, and also cultural knowledge that has been

fiercely guarded by tribal leaders because they say it's been exploited in the past. So let's say

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