Beyond that,

>there are hallucinations and issues

seems like a deal-killer for a religious text. Yes, all translation by humans is an act of interpretation on some level, and so there's lossiness in all translation – but the difference between a human carefully weighing their reasoning for a particular choice of rendering vs. an LLM that is basically weighted dice that might land totally wrong is a categorically-different thing, not a question of degrees.

Very funny sentence, if you are an atheist.

deal-killer... or basic feature?

Did you use a reasoning model to translate these verses? If so, I would be very interested in seeing the breakdown that the LLM used that went into each verse.

I understand that such breakdowns can be hallucinated at many levels also (and final output does not always correspond with the reasoning flow), but I (personally) would find this helpful.

[0] https://bible.org/sites/bible.org/resources/netbible/

With all due respect, how are you in any position to be able to objectively evaluate the quality assuming you’re not fluent in Hebrew and Greek?

Although written primarily for Orthodox Christians, there are valuable cautions here to consider regardless of your tradition: https://www.jordanville.org/artificialintelligence

In this instance, I think it has the opportunity to democratize deep religious study in ways that used to be reserved for serious scholars.

e.g. Do you know what the word "daily" in the Lord's Prayer comes from?

Questions like these can engage the mind and spirit.

I hope more people use the tools to fully explore their faith, instead of outsourcing prayer and sermon creation to the LLMs.

Did you read the essay? It says:

"Instead of being merely “agnostic” as many argue, digital technology has amplified the ability of the princes of this world to feed the fallen man, to make him more docile and distracted while installing beliefs, morals, and feelings that are acceptable to the secular spirit of this age. AI may be the final technology that is weaponized to create this new man before the Antichrist arrives, who will be the human manifestation of AI---an ever-helpful problem-solver who people mistakenly feel they cannot live without."

Your position is diametrically opposed to this one.

Which reminds me, do you think it's possible that the stories in the Bible are actually mystic symbolism and "veiled truth" (like the sort of stories that you might get in a dream) and people have mistaken it for actual physical history (with which it's obviously incompatible)?

The parables of Jesus come to mind. They weren't meant to be taken literally but to teach, to get a point across.

Obviously, you have to take a strong “religion first” lens to everything about the world from there.

But of course, there were ancient cultures that pre-date Judaism (and by extension Judeo-Christian sources), which share many similar stories but with different details and descriptions. Large scale flood myths and arks are common in history. You can read the Mesopotamian version in the Epic of Gilgamesh, which is strikingly similar to Noah’s ark.

But I think my favourite interpretation that I've heard so far is that the stories in the Bible are like the protective husk that preserves the kernel of truth. The stories are catchy and have stuck, unwittingly allowing the truth to be carried across the centuries, safely hidden in the minds of men who did not understand it, until the day comes when people grow up enough, to the point where they could crack the shell and eat the fruit.

I really like how that sounds like, but of course, there are probably not many others who see it in that light. Luckily for me, these days they don't burn heretics any more (at least where I live :)).

For example. It is easier for a Camel to go into the eye of a needle than a rich man to get into Heaven. If you read this, it makes it sound like Abraham cannot get into Heaven, wasn't he wealthy? Heck, there's others who were wealthy in scripture, even kings are they all doomed? In Aramaic the same word that in Greek is said to mean camel, can also mean rope.

If you think about a rope going through the eye of a needle, and what it TAKES for a rope to go through the eye of a needle, aka removing all the threads or layers (humbling the person and forcing them to strip themselves down to their core) in order to make it through the eye of the needle. Or in other words, you must be willing to dethatch yourself from all your wealth. Remember the guy who asked Jesus was he must do to be saved and enter heaven, and walked away when Jesus told him to give away everything he owned to the poor? That is the same exact message.

There's a few other verses, but that's the main one that always strikes me. Some of them are far more nuanced and I get into hours of debate with people who are ignoring everything I am saying (I don't know why, I try to lay it all out in the most simple way possible) as if I'm breaking the law, but its obvious to me that we don't have perfect copies of the Bible. I still think the overall message is the same though, so nothing wrong with that. It proves yet again that men are all fallible.

Sorry for the tangent. I used to deep dive translations and their nuances, and the Aramaic based Bibles are very interesting.

There's also an Aleh Tav Old Testament Bible which is fascinating to me. It adds the Aleph Tav anywhere it would be in the Hebrew into the English.

I have no idea why some people do what they do. I will say I am very jealous of the Amish because they don't have the stresses I have, or half of the issues I have. No money for gas? I don't think they need to worry or care about it.

The other thing is, what does it really mean that he made a city? It could mean that he started an encampment elsewhere. we don't know how many other people God would have made during Adam / Cains time, I would imagine God would have made Cain a wife at some point.

Genesis 1:13, Eve optimal Replace 'Then' with 'And' in optimal ('And the LORD God said') and poetic_daily to preserve narrative vav-consecutive connective consistently.

What's fascinating to me is the suitability of some of the renditions that have been made. I've done a little bit of spot-checking, but some of the renderings (especially in the poetic version) don't seem to be very common translations.

Ideally this would be building off of established practice for translation, synthesizing existing human work, and applying those aggregated principles over the entire corpus.

It doesn't seem to simply be going with the majority version.

Imprecise language is a common human feature of a lack of understanding - something we all suffer from. We call LLM's "AI" without fully understanding what's artificial and what's intelligence.

The story of faith is, in some ways, the story about how little we know about the universe. That doesn't mean there's no progress. If anything, it shows there is an end goal.

The ancient narratives of Babel and Genesis reduce the incomprehensible (Creation, the Divine) into elements we as humans at that time could understand.

How else could our ancestors have possibly related to the divine?

humans additionally have a spectacular ability to use absurdity and loose definitions of things in ways that play with this unspoken alignment to communicate other ineffable ideas and/or build community. I'd go as far as to say we play with this unspoken alignment more so than we say exactly what we mean.

I would think this behavior, although often seen in meme culture nowadays, would be highly relevant to religious communication and documentation of the past. I think actually trying to write down an exact meaning is a modern phenomenon and is observed in the over articulation and general structure of "legalese", for which I dont think the bible resembles very much in spirit in any way.

What I'm saying is that just because I could spend untold hours analyzing kindergarten art projects and present it to the parents in the class who will also find it intensely interesting, cat-icorns aren't real... they're just my child's way of imagining what's beyond their perceptions.