About this series

About this series 

For this series of news stories from the 2025 Missional AI Summit, we decided to not only report about AI and God’s mission, but also to use AI experimentally in some of our own writing, editing and illustrating processes.

To transcribe audio recordings of the sessions, for instance, we used Google’s NotebookLM and found it to be fast and very accurate.

For the story from the panel discussion about Bible translation and AI, we transcribed the audio in NotebookLM, then copied and pasted the text transcript into ChatGPT and prompted: ‘Write the following notes into a news story of 900 words or less. This story is for a global audience of people who work in Bible translation and may not know a lot yet about how AI is being used to accelerate the work. Keep the story easy for a non-tech person to understand. If jargon is used, explain it. Overall focus should be that AI is an unprecedented opportunity for Bible translators, and that it is eliminating the “drudgery tasks”’.

In roughly four seconds, ChatGPT produced a well-organised draft. It was far from perfect. It missed a few points we wanted to include. It got a few terms wrong. It also changed people’s quotes significantly. The quotes sounded good, but they weren’t exactly what the people said. That’s a problem; when we present something within quotation marks, it means that is exactly what the person said (with an occasional grammar fix or translation adjustment). 

So, using the original transcript, we fixed all of the quotes. Then we edited the story, changing some of the sentence structures and organisation. Our verdict is similar to what translation teams have found so far: AI is great for drafting and organizing, and it eliminates drudgery like transcribing interviews. But we would never publish something without a human touch.

From the original English versions, we used DeepL to translate all of the stories into the five additional languages that we publish most Alliance material: Chinese, French, Indonesian, Portuguese and Spanish. Up until now, we have mostly relied on human translators for this task. Please send us your thoughts (info@wycliffe.net) on the accuracy of the AI version in your preferred language. We know the AI translation will not be perfect. But, does it present any barrier to you?

The illustration for the series, the human hand below a transparent globe, was created with Google ImageFX.

Alliance organisations are welcome to download and use images from this series.