CROATIAN LANGUAGE AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE IN THE CONTEXT OF SYNTHETIC MEDIA Borko BARABAN PhD, Associate professor, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Academy of Arts and Culture, Department of Culture, Media and Management. CROATIA Snježana BARIĆ-ŠELMIĆ PhD, Josip Juraj Strossmayer University of Osijek, Academy of Arts and Culture, Department of Culture, Media and Management. CROATIA ABSTRACT Synthetic or artificial media are digital media created by artificial intelligence. More precisely, they are created by manipulation of artificial intelligence algorithms. Synthetic text, image, sound, video, and various 3D applications are the main types of synthetic media. These high- quality forms of virtual content have drawn the attention of the general public, mostly due to their ability to manipulate perceptions. ChatGPT, OpenAI’s text generation programme, broke all records in terms of fast adoption in the general public, capital investments and technological breakthroughs that are potentially more far-reaching even than the internet itself. The creation of a synthetic text involves the use of artificial intelligence, including natural language processing (NLP), to generate written content such as articles, news, stories and social media posts. OpenAI developed a language model whose output text is similar to human- created text, and which is capable of answering questions. Notwithstanding all interesting innovations introduced by this advanced technology, especially in the world of entertainment, we must also question the possible ethical and social implications, but also the implications for the use of “small” languages like Croatian. ChatGPT is rather good at translating inquiries and replies into English, which functions as a lingua franca, but it often has trouble translating English into other languages. Languages such as French and Chinese, which are known as “high-resource” languages and are extensively represented in databases, translate from and into English much better than Javanese and other “low-resource” languages. Difficulties in translation into the Croatian language on the one hand and inaccurate factographic information on the Croatian language culture on the other arise in this context. Keywords: low-resource language, high-resource language, synthetic media, synthetic text, artificial intelligence INTRODUCTION The intense and soaring technological development and progress of humanity occurred through four industrial revolutions. The first industrial revolution, ushered in by the discovery of the Page 1098 of 1105 INTERNATIONAL EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH-IX, January 19-21, 2024/ Valencia, Spain INTERNATIONAL EUROPEAN CONFERENCE ON INTERDISCIPLINARY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH-IX, January 19-21, 2024/ Valencia, Spain