Jeff and Judy Heath join us in this episode to talk about their recent presentation at the Bible Translation conference called The Privilege of the First Draft, which critically examines the technical and ethical implications of using Artificial Intelligence tools, specifically Scripture Forge, to generate initial drafts of Bible translations. The paper highlights that AI-drafted texts in their target language demonstrated numerous problems. They explore the limitations of AI, such as its inability to understand meaning, its dependence on limited training data for minority languages, and the risks of cognitive offloading for human translators. Ultimately, the paper concludes with a strong recommendation that the essential "privilege of first draft" should be reserved for in-culture, first-language speakers to preserve the human, spiritual, and cultural integrity of the translation process.
Write to judy_heath@sil.org for a copy of the unpublished paper.
Bibliography for further study.
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