Missionary Leslie Taylor preaches in both English and Japanese at our bilingual church every Sunday. Matsudo Christ Church In the Tokyo area.
A military kid who spent his childhood in Japan, Florida and Tennessee, the father of three prepares his lessons in English.
ChatGPT helped missionary Leslie Taylor improve her sermon preparation process.
He then translates the manuscript into Japanese, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph.
“The translation aspect can obviously be very difficult,” said Taylor, who holds a master's degree in pastoral studies from the university. Freed-Hardeman University Henderson, Tennessee
Chat GPT, An artificial intelligence chatbot developed by OpenAI helps missionaries improve their processes.
“We do as much as we can ourselves, but sometimes AI programs can help, especially with complex sentence structures,” Taylor says, “or we ask for nuanced explanations.”
“It is still necessary to know Japanese. Sometimes I make mistakes in my translations or they are a little off from my intention, so I have to look at that,” he added, “But it is a useful tool in the review process. However, I would never use Japanese as a source for the actual content.”
About 6,500 miles away, Senior Minister Dion Frazier Reynoldsburg Church of Christ A pastor outside Columbus, Ohio, is using ChatGPT to translate sermons into Creole.
“There is a growing Haitian population in our area who are beginning to attend church regularly,” Fraser explains. “We translate and distribute the books to homes every week.”
Above, missionary Leslie Taylor takes a selfie with his wife and children in Japan.
Speeding up Bible translation
Complete translations of the Bible are available in over 700 languages, representing the native languages of 80 percent of the world's population. The American Bible Society points out:
About 3,750 languages lack complete translations, but AI could help speed up the process of translating the Bible from its original Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek into more languages. according to From ReligionLink.com.
a A team from the University of Southern California's Information Sciences Institute “By using natural language processing to enable machines to understand and respond to text and speech data, we are making Bible translation more efficient and reaching more languages faster.” Ken Chitwood reports: ReligionLink.com Editor.
American Christians have mixed feelings about AI, with 30% saying they find AI exciting, but 34% saying they find it frightening. According to a recent study by the Barna Group: In partnership with Glue, a California Catholic advocacy group Recently fired the robot priest. He encouraged his followers to “baptize their children with Gatorade.”
Mary Nelson, a missionary in Tauranga, New Zealand, who works with her husband, David, shares both enthusiasm and caution about AI.
Related: Bible reading volunteers wanted
“I personally have reservations about the whole field of AI,” Nelson says. “We subconsciously think about all the problems that it could and will create. But if there are tools that can deliver Bible lessons faster, I don't see why we should just say no.”
“I think we should take every precaution and use the tools, but use them wisely,” she stressed. “If we're using this artificial intelligence with our own human intelligence, I think that's a really good thing.”
“I myself am uneasy about the whole AI world. … But if there's a tool that can deliver a Bible lesson faster … I don't see why we should say no.”
'Maybe we should It uses AI
Ten years ago, Nelson launched an online ministry. Mission Bible Class.
Currently the sponsor is Memorial Road Christian Church In Oklahoma City, the ministry provides free resources to teach children around the world.
Nelson's collection of more than 170 Bible stories, all in English, gets about 8,000 page views a day, and for years she has dreamed of reaching the roughly 500 million Spanish speakers around the world.
Related: Teaching the Gospel over Zoom
To pursue that goal, she and her team worked with translator Taye Perkins, a Lubbock, Texas, resident and former missionary in Chile, to develop a plan they estimated would cost $100,000 and take two years.
But then the ministry's supporters asked whether it had ever considered deploying AI.
They rejected it.
Yet they tried again, not realizing how quickly and how far technology had advanced.
“We were basically just testing it,” says Gina Noredo, who works with Nelson in New Zealand. Memorial Road Mission Helper “The logic was: Let’s give you some reason not to use AI. And then we realized: should Let's use AI.”
They found that ChatGPT could translate English lessons into Spanish in an easily editable format.
“It takes me two to three hours to translate one of her lessons,” Perkins said of the previous manual process, followed by another hour of editing.
“AI allows us to pursue our passion projects more efficiently.”
In comparison, the AI translates the same lesson in less than 15 minutes before handing it off to a human editor. “Editing an AI-run lesson takes about 30 to 45 minutes,” Perkins said.
Suddenly, the expected overall project cost dropped by 75% to about $25,000, and the anticipated timeline was split in half to a year.
“AI allows me to be more efficient at pursuing projects that I'm passionate about,” said Nored, who has degrees in ministry and elementary education. Lipscomb University “But it also frees up time, energy and resources for other things that can take a back seat or can't be done,” said the Nashville, Tennessee, native.
In a Zoom interview, Taye Perkins (top), Mary Nelson and Gina Noredo (bottom) discuss the online ministry Mission Bible Class's use of artificial intelligence.
Better technology, lower costs
Gina's father, veteran pastor James Noredo, speaks only English.
“I learned Greek and Hebrew and things like that, but I'm not that fluent in other languages.” Oklahoma Christian University, Harding Theological Seminary Fuller Theological Seminary.
But through the magic of AI, his voice can adapt to different languages. Arabic To Portuguese.
Noredo is The next generation for Christ, A Virginia-based ministry focused on evangelism, discipleship, and missions. Atonement Story Movie Series, It was filmed in Israel and other countries and is available in over 60 languages.
“Most of the languages in the Story of Redemption series have been translated by humans and professional translators, with the help of AI tools,” Noredo said, “and we've found some really good and talented people to narrate the stories.”
But advances in AI have allowed the ministry to “rapidly create” computer-generated narration for videos and subtitles, he said, which he noted can be especially useful when funding, voice actors and time are in short supply.
He gave the example of his work with blind people in Albania.
“There were video series with subtitles, but they weren’t very useful for this ethnic group,” Noredo said. “We were able to quickly create a video series with subtitles. AI-generated Albanian narration, And it worked.”
James Nored is in Israel shooting videos for the “Story of Redemption Film Series.”
Sacred Mission
Now back in Japan, Taylor emphasizes that his sermons are more than just words written on paper.
When he stands before his multicultural congregation – Americans, Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, Lithuanians and more – he's not just imparting information.
He is preaching the gospel.
“Obviously it's about conveying the core of the Bible,” he said, “but when you really think about it, it's very humbling because you're representing God to people. … So I think it's sacred work that should be taken seriously.”
He believes AI can help with that task.
But it cannot replace the value and necessity of human intellectual interaction with the Bible.
Bobby Ross Jr. The editor-in-chief Christian Chronicle. Ross writes the Weekend Plug-in column. ReligionUnplugged.com, This article was originally published here. He uses an AI program called Otter to transcribe the interviews. Contact him at [email protected].
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