Generating Wisdom: Artificial Intelligence and the Bible | Conference Recap

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Over the last year, artificial intelligence has become a household phrase. AI has made its mark everywhere—from financial markets to college plagiarism guidelines—and it will soon impact our understanding of the Bible as well. Bible translations facilitated by AI, as well as commentaries, concordances, encyclopedias, and other interpretive aids, are already emerging, and many more are on the horizon. This past July, Museum of the Bible and AI & Faith co-hosted “Generating Wisdom: Artificial Intelligence and the Bible,” a two-day conference that brought together technical and biblical experts to explore the implications of AI for Bible translation, interpretation, and more.

AI and Bible Translation | AI and Bible Interpretation | Biblical Perspectives on AI

Artificial Intelligence and Bible Translation

The first session at the conference explored the opportunities and challenges posed by the use of AI in Bible translation projects. Representatives from leading Bible translation organizations—including Biblica, SIL International, Wycliffe, Scriptura, and others—spoke about cutting-edge projects leveraging artificial intelligence within their respective institutions.

One common thread running through many of these talks was the balance between human translators and AI tools. While experts are optimistic about the potential of AI to accelerate the translation process, they are also realistic about the inherent limitations of AI. As Marcus Schwarting, Elizabeth Robar, and others noted, AI can assist human translators, but it cannot entirely replace them—hence the unofficial motto of the Partnership for Applied Biblical Natural Language Processing: “augmentation, not automation, for Bible translation.”

Nevertheless, AI-powered tools have the potential to radically reshape how human translators do their work. AI can be used to generate a baseline translation so human translators need not start from scratch. It can provide contextual information about source and target languages. It can assess the accuracy of a translation. It can provide alternative translation options. It can automate basic tasks. It can do all these things and much more. Myriad AI-powered tools are currently in development, and some are already in use. These tools will soon transform the translation process, making it possible to translate the Bible into novel languages with unprecedented speed and accuracy.

AI also appears likely to affect who translates the Bible. Bible translations have long been time- and capital-intensive endeavors. In poorer communities without the resources to translate the Bible on their own, translations have often been managed by external teams with centralized support from wealthier nations. AI, though, will make it possible for smaller teams with fewer resources to do more with less. Locals will be able to drive translation projects internally rather than relying largely on external support, making Bible translation a more distributed and local-led endeavor. Ultimately, AI appears poised to affect nearly every aspect of Bible translation, from its processes, its speed, and its cost, to the people who participate.

To learn more about the accuracy of Bible translations in low-resource languages, listen to Marcus Schwarting’s talk on the eBible corpus.

For more information about using AI to assess and improve the quality of Bible translations, listen to Cassie Weishaupt’s talk on AQuA (Augmented Quality Assessment).

For the critical importance of humans in the translation process and the many ways AI is reshaping who can and does participate in that process, listen to Ryder Wishart’s talk on human-centric approaches to Bible translation.

To learn more about the role AI-powered translation tools in the global Bible translation enterprise, listen to Randall Tan’s talk on Translator’s Copilot.

For more on the inherent limitations of AI and its wise application in light of these limitations, listen to Elizabeth Robar’s talk on the respective strengths and weaknesses of humans and AI.

Artificial Intelligence and Biblical Interpretation

The second session at the conference explored the opportunities and challenges posed by the use of AI in biblical interpretation.

To anyone with even a passing familiarity with AI, it likely seems self-evident that AI could be used to translate the Bible—we have all used Google translate, after all. But it is perhaps less obvious to many people that AI could prove equally helpful in the interpretation of the Bible. AI-powered analytical tools do not have the ability to replace the human interpreter, but they do have the ability to augment the interpretive process—very much like AI-powered translation tools, which have the ability to augment (but not replace) the human translator.

AI can be applied in myriad ways throughout the interpretive process. As Mark Graves showed in his talk, AI can be used to generate topical groups based on the probability distribution of specific words in the biblical text. Analysis of these topical groups reveals similarities, differences, and unexpected thematic connections between different books in the Bible. Or, as Sara Wolkenfeld discussed, AI can be used to generate the metadata that powers massive online research databases, enabling researchers to draw thematic, linguistic, or referential connections between tens of thousands of biblical and extra-biblical texts.

It is clear that AI can aid the interpretive process in many ways. Whether it should aid the interpretive process—and if so, exactly how, where, and to what extent—is perhaps a more contentious question that biblical scholars, theologians, ethicists, and computer scientists alike will need to consider as the field advances.

For more on the use of AI and biblical interpretation, listen to Mark Graves’s talk on statistical interpretation of religious texts.

For the use of AI to build textual databases and generate digital resources that facilitate scholarly study, listen to Sara Wolkenfeld’s talk on Sefaria.

For more on the difficult ethical questions surrounding the use of AI in the interpretive process, listen to David Zvi Kalman’s talk on AI and the Torah.

Biblical Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence

While first portion of the conference explored the use of AI in the process of Bible translation and interpretation, the final session explored broader questions about the ways the Bible might inform our understanding of AI and AI might inform our understanding of the Bible.

What does the Bible teach us about knowledge? How can that wisdom be applied to our understanding of AI as the technological and cultural phenomenon that it is? Should we use it? Should we trust it? What exactly is it? Even more provocatively, how does it compare to us? In what ways is it similar? In what ways is it different? What makes us unique? Melanie Dzugan, Marius Dorobantu, Daren Erisman, and Douglas Estes explored these questions—and many others—in their talks at the conference.

There is much we cannot predict about the trajectory of AI. How quickly will it develop, and will its capabilities eventually plateau? There is, likewise, much about AI—as it exists today—that remains open to debate. Is it actually intelligent? What exactly counts as intelligence? These questions and uncertainties—and many others like them—seem likely to animate spirited debates for the foreseeable future, but if there is one thing we can be confident about—a common thread shared by many of the talks—it is that placing AI and the Bible side by side offers us a remarkable opportunity to enrich our understanding of ourselves and the world around us. AI should be seen not as a threat to our conception of Bible but as an opportunity to probe and fortify our understanding of the Bible (and ourselves). Likewise, the Bible should be seen not as a dead-end for our analysis of AI but as a rich repository of wisdom to shape how we understand this remarkable technology.

AI can be used, as Marius Dorobantu showed, to probe our understanding of the image of God. The Bible can be used, as Melanie Dzugan and Daren Erisman discussed, to shape our wise and unwise applications of AI. Ultimately, both AI and the Bible can be used to elucidate the other, as Douglas Estes showed in his talk on conceptions of AI and the apocalypse.

To learn more about how AI might affect our understanding of the Bible and ourselves, listen to Marius Dorobantu’s talk on AI and the image of God.