The Privilege of First Draft: Technical and Ethical Aspects of Using AI to Draft Scripture

The considerable power of Artificial Intelligence (AI) intrigues those eager to see the Bible accessible to all peoples. Scripture Forge, an AI drafting tool, builds a parallel language model from existing vernacular Scripture and a reference translation, then uses that model to generate drafts of other biblical books.

As consultants in translation and language technology, we examined the technical, practical and ethical issues raised by this approach. We asked the Scripture Forge team to produce different drafts of 1 Samuel and Psalms in Chadian Arabic, based on several reference translations. We found that these AI-drafted translations contained many errors in both exegetical accuracy and naturalness. In addition to evaluating these drafts, we interacted with prior BT Conference presentations, recent webinars, articles, and insights from users of AI drafting.

In this paper we first explore the technical nature of AI, including its capabilities and limitations. Then we examine the complexities of the Bible translation process, errors typical of AI drafts and reasons for those errors, and the impact of AI-drafting on translators and communities. Finally, we present ethical and theological objections to using AI to produce first drafts of Bible translations.

While we see many opportunities for using AI tools in Bible translation, such as assisting translators with exegetical research or quality control, we conclude that initial drafts of Bible translations should not be produced by AI. We propose that the privilege of first draft should remain with in-culture, first-language speakers.