Is the Holy Ghost in the Machine? Ethical Considerations for Using AI in Bible Translation

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools have proliferated across many industries, as businesses seek to increase efficiency and productivity. The Bible translation community is also currently grappling with whether and how to incorporate AI-based machine translation into its work. Bible translation seeks to faithfully communicate God’s Word in all languages, and this context raises distinctive ethical and theological concerns for the use of AI.

In this presentation, we survey how AI technology is changing the Bible translation process and explore some of the considerations that arise. We address potential trade-offs, including whether AI-accelerated drafting affects translation quality, and whether AI primarily empowers communities or disenfranchises human translators. We conclude that AI can be used ethically in Bible translation, and present a set of guiding principles to evaluate the real and perceived trade-offs of adopting AI technology. In addition to discussing some of the ethical and theological concerns with AI, we offer practical suggestions for tool-builders who are seeking to develop AI for the Bible translation community. These recommendations are based on our experience with developing an AI drafting software that has been used by around 400 Bible translation teams in diverse contexts.