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AI Summit highlights what is coming soon ... and what is here now

In his keynote address at the recent Global Missional AI Summit, SIL data scientist Dan Whitenack showed a photo familiar to anyone who has ever been around Bible translation: a translator at a project site working on a laptop, using Paratext.

Dan Whitenack during his keynote presentation, showing what AI-assisted Bible translation will NOT look like.

Then he showed a picture representing fears of how artificial intelligence will change Bible translation. The photo showed a room full of supercomputers, no humans in sight. This, he said, does not represent the future of Bible translation aided by AI.

“It will not be a computer popping out a Bible,” Whitenack said. “It will look more like this.”

And he showed the original picture again — “A Bible translator doing Bible translation with new, advanced tools that come along beside translators and consultants and help them.”

Big themes

The summit, held 12-14 April at Wycliffe USA in Orlando, Florida, brought together Christians working on the future of AI as it relates to the global church. Sponsors included SIL, Every Tribe Every Nation‘s Innovation Lab, Biblica, American Bible Society, Global Media Outreach and Christian Vision Global.

During a week when it was easy to get lost among futuristic thinking, tech jargon and Star Wars references, these were some recurring themes:

AI could drastically reduce the time needed to translate a high-quality Bible — maybe by more than half. It could serve as a valuable assistant before, during and after language projects. It could allow translators to see past their own cultural contexts in translating Scripture. AI also could benefit the church with well-designed Scripture engagement tools stocked with incredible amounts of data, offering vast resources in many languages.
AI also could cause deep spiritual damage, leaving thousands of languages behind and enabling poorly designed Scripture engagement tools, which could leave Christians lazy and confused with mangled theology. Kind of like a library with no librarians and with all of the books on the floor.
Christians need to be involved in developing AI platforms and their underlying ethics. If we are not, these systems could be inherently biased against a biblical view of the world.

A reliable guide

Elizabeth Robar

Elizabeth Robar, founder and director of Cambridge Digital Bible Research, sees AI’s potential to be a reliable guide, pointing translators and consultants to the most-useful resources, quickly. The ideal tool, she said, will be “fully aware of a translation team’s workflow and available resources.” For example, it would know which resources translators commonly consult after drafting. It would be aware of other teams’ related work. And it could make recommendations on how to modify workflow for greater efficiency.

“During drafting, the ideal system would be able to look over the shoulder of a translator and provide prompts for necessary decisions,” she said. For instance, it could ask questions during the lookup and checking processes.

“If we have an analysis of a text, say, the message of a Psalm, is that message being drawn out?” she said. “These are the emotions that should happen. Do you see that happening in your text? In some ways, this is having a virtual translation consultant.”

But always, she emphasised, the technology serves the human translation team – not the other way around. In fact, AI could be built right into a future version of Paratext, which then would serve as the central source that links all of those resources.

More ways AI can help

Dan Whitenack

SIL’s Whitenack mentioned more things AI will be able to do.

Help optimise the order in which books and verses are translated. Rather than simply beginning with chapter 1, verse 1 of a book, for instance, a “golden path” emerges as key words and phrases are translated. With each subsequent verse and chapter, AI assistance will get better.
Give suggestions. As the user is typing and working in a certain verse, they get a pop-up suggestion for translation or reference, based on previous work. This is similar to what Microsoft Word or Google already do, but optimised for Bible translators and embedded in Paratext.
Better, faster lookup systems. Whitenack likes the term “copilot” because “it implies that there’s a pilot. There’s still a human at the (controls).”
“Translators are good at translating,” he said. “They do this all day long. … But then they get to a point of, What is an ephod? And then it’s just a blocker. They have to stop and search through maybe 17 panes of different resources. So we want a better lookup system for that.”
For instance: a translator could ask: “Why didn’t Jonah want to go to Ninevah?” A copilot system under development gives an accurate answer and citation—in this case, the Tyndale Study Notes. Developers envision a near future when AI can translate resources like this into many languages.
Pairing existing quality assessment methods with AI. “Radiologists are already being paired with image analyzers to help analyse medical imagery and make diagnoses,” he said. “We should be able to do a parallel thing with AI pair reviewers, where we are able to pick apart a draft and understand various qualities about that draft, missing or added information, clarity or naturalness issues.”
Digital publishing and Scripture engagement in many languages simultaneously on websites and social media pages. SIL is working on a chat platform called M2, in which an organisation could add numerous languages to the same bot (which “chats” with the user — like many retail or travel websites do).
“This is a foundation for interacting with many different language communities without the operational burden of having to clone 33 bots, connect all the data analytics together, copy all the rules over, manage all the translations,” Whitenack said. “All of that is taken care of here. So you can quickly create a bot that you can run on 33 different Facebook pages, engaging people in 33 languages.”

Story: Jim Killam, Wycliffe Global Alliance

More about SIL’s AI work

“A Sputnik moment”: The release of ChatGPT represents ”a Sputnik moment” for technology — and an opportunity the church should not miss, an expert says.
AI tools, and challenges, for discipleship: A digital theology consultant explores how generative AI could help, or hinder, Scripture engagement.

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Tech pioneer: Christians ‘have to show up’ for AI

Silicon Valley pioneer Pat Gelsinger was CEO of Intel Corporation until December 2024. Quickly realising his career in technology was not finished, he joined the faith/tech platform Gloo in early 2025 as the executive chair and head of technology. He is also a general partner at the venture capital firm Playground Global. Gelsinger was instrumental in the development of cloud computing, Wi-Fi, USB and many other everyday technologies. He estimates his work has touched 60 to 70 percent of humanity. Here are highlights of his keynote talk at the 2025 Missional AI Summit. You can watch his entire talk here. Pat Gelsinger (left) is interviewed onstage by Steele Billings. Both are with Gloo. Watch the full interview here. Is technology good or bad? Technology is neither good nor bad. It’s neutral. It can be used for good. It can be used for bad. … If you think back to the Roman roads, why did Christ come when he came? I’ll argue the Pax Romana and the Roman roads. … The greatest technology of the day was the Roman road system. It was used so the Word could go out. Historical example I will argue Martin Luther was the most significant figure of the last thousand years. And what did he do? He used the greatest piece of technology available at the day, the Gutenberg printing press. He created Bibles. … He broke, essentially, the monopoly on the Bible translations …. He ushered in education. He created the systems that led to the Renaissance. That’s a little punk monk who only wanted to get an audience with the pope because he thought he had a few theological errors. I’ll argue (Luther was) the most significant figure of the last thousand years, using technology to improve the lives of every human that he touched at the time. How today compares to the dawn of the internet AI is more important. AI will be more significant. AI will be more dramatic. … This is now incredibly useful, and we’re going to see AI become just like the internet, where every single interaction will be infused with AI capabilities. In the 75-year-or-so history of computing, we humans have been adapting to the computer. … With AI, computers adapt to us. We talk to them. They hear us. They see us for the first time. And now they are becoming a user interface that fits with humanity. And for this and so many other reasons that every technology has been building on the prior technology, AI will unquestionably be the biggest of these waves, more impactful even than the internet was. On the need for AI development to be open-source It is so critical because we’re embedding knowledge, embedding values, embedding understanding into those underlying models, large language models and every aspect that happens. It must be open, and this is part of what I think is critical about us being together here today. We need to be creating trusted, open, useful AI that we can build humanity on. On the need for Christians to help build AI systems We have to show up as the faith community to be influencing those outcomes, because remember what happened in the social media. We didn’t show up, and look at what we got. So are we going to miss this opportunity for something that’s far more important than social networking with AI? Where it truly in the models embeds every aspect of human history and values into it? We have to show up, team. What we do with large language models is far more important because truly we are choosing how we embody knowledge of all time into those underlying models. They need to be open. They need to be trusted. What Christians must bring to the process If we’re going to show up to influence AI broadly, we have to show up with good engineering, good data, good understanding, good frameworks. How do you measure things like ‘Is that leading to better character? Is that leading to better relationships? Is that creating better vocational outcomes? Is that a valid view of a spiritual perspective?’ We need good underlying data associated with each one of these. And for that we’re actively involved. We’re driving to create that underlying data set. Because we need to show up with good data if we’re going to influence how AI is created. How should this work? For the AI systems we need to create good benchmarks. If I ask about God, does it give me a good answer or not? If I ask about relationships with my children, does it give me good answers? We need to create the corpus of data to give good answers to those questions. And, armed with that good data, we need to show up to influence the total landscape of AI. We want to benchmark OpenAI. We’re going to benchmark Gemini. We’re going to benchmark Claude. We’re going to benchmark Copilot. This is what we’re going to do at Gloo, but we want to be part of a broader community in that discussion so that we’re influential in creating flourishing AI. Technology is a force for good. AI that truly embeds the values that we care about, that we want to honour, that we want to be representing into the future and benchmarking across all of them. Oh his role with Gloo We are going to change the landscape of the faith community and its role in shaping this most critical technology, AI, for faith and flourishing. That’s what we’re going to do at Gloo and we need all of your help and partnership to do so because if we don’t hang together, we’re not going to influence the outcome, right? ‘Here am I, Lord’ I don’t think I’m done. … You and I both need to come to the same position like Isaiah did. Here am I, Lord. Send me. Send me. Send us. That we can be shaping technology as a force for good. That we could grab this moment in time. This is the greatest time to live in human history. We’re going to solve diseases. We’re going to improve lives. We’re going to educate every person in poverty. We are going to solve climate issues. We are going to be using these technologies to improve the lives of every human on the planet. We are going to shape technology as a force for good. Here am I, Lord. Send me. ••• Story: Jim Killam, Wycliffe Global Alliance Translated with ChatGPT. How was the translation accuracy? Let us know at info@wycliffe.net. Alliance organisations are welcome to download and use images from this series.