কৃত্রিম বুদ্ধিমত্তা ও লোকসংস্কৃতি সংরক্ষণ : একটি সমাজতাত্ত্বিক বিশ্লেষণ/ Artificial Intelligence and the Preservation of Folk Culture: A Sociological Analysis

Abstract

Folk culture-including oral narratives, folk songs, ritual performances, handicrafts, dialects, and community-based knowledge systems-has long served as a vessel of collective memory and social identity. In the twenty-first century, however, rapid urbanization, migration, market-driven homogenization, and the weakening of intergenerational transmission have placed many folk traditions at risk of disappearing. This paper examines the emerging role of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in documenting, revitalizing, and disseminating folk culture, and situates this discussion within a sociological framework. Building on Émile Durkheim's idea of collective consciousness, Robert Redfield's folk-urban continuum, and insights from contemporary digital sociology, the paper argues that AI technologies-including natural language processing, speech-to-text transcription, machine translation, image and pattern recognition, and generative modelling - offer new and powerful tools for archiving endangered oral traditions, reconstructing fading practices, and making folk heritage accessible to wider and younger audiences. At the same time, the paper takes a critical view of the risks that come with this technological intervention: the possibility that sacred or community-owned knowledge may be stripped of its original context and turned into a commercial product, the unequal access created by the digital divide, unresolved questions of intellectual property and consent within folk communities, and the danger that algorithm-driven curation may end up flattening the very diversity it sets out to protect. Drawing on examples from Bengal and other folk traditions - including Baul music, archives of the Bratachari movement, and tribal oral literature - the paper shows both the promise and the pitfalls of AI-assisted cultural preservation. It concludes that AI can genuinely support folklorists, sociologists, and community custodians, but only when it is deployed through participatory approaches that treat folk communities as co-owners and decision-makers, not passive subjects of digitization. The paper closes with a proposed ethical, community-centred framework for AI-based cultural preservation projects, one that emphasizes informed consent, fair benefit-sharing, and the protection of living, evolving traditions rather than their reduction to static digital artefacts.