Google's lead AI advocate on Friday said artificial intelligence can be used to preserve culture, as models can be created for people to learn about a culture on their phones.

Speaking at the FII PRIORITY Hong Kong Summit, Laurence Moroney said it is easy for non-mainstream cultures to be lost when there is a deluge of information these days, but AI can change that.

He said artificial intelligence algorithms, which are being created to understand drawing and writing, can also be used to understand culture.

"So as you start thinking about training a model for a specific, individual task - for example preserving a culture - now the task is less about technology and more about simply curating the data," he said.

Moroney said it is possible to condense culture into an AI model that people can interact with.

"In the cases of... we spoke earlier about education, that places that don't have access to massive cloud compute, these models are going to fit on a phone. They're not going to need internet connectivity," he said.

"We can actually have people being able to interact with these things on a small device like a phone or a laptop or a Chromebook, where they can now interact, learn about, understand their culture, and ultimately preserve it in the long term."