When the Singaporean government asked local writers if they would agree to having their work used to train a large language model, it probably did not expect the country’s tiny literary community to react so fiercely. An email sent late in March said that the National Multimodal LLM Programme (NMLP) aimed to address the bias of existing LLMs that have “disproportionately large influences” from Western societies. Singapore’s own LLM, trained on material produced locally, would have more accurate ...