I Typed the Bible Into an Artificial Intelligence Art Generator. Here's What Happened

I'm getting ahead of myself here. Artificial intelligence art generation is a controversial topic and it should be. I've been toying with it for the last several days and I'm both intrigued and disturbed by what I'm seeing. That said, I set out to generate art depicting the story of Jesus calming the storm in Matthew 8, and that's just what I did. For better or worse, here's the process I went through (in almost real time, though I did trim about a minute of dead space while waiting on the AI to render), and the final product.

[jupiterlegrand]

All AI art has an intensely disturbing quality to it. It's difficult to describe, but it reminds me of some dreams I've had since I was a child...there is an vague (again I will use the word) "quality" to it that is intense, that skews perspective, conflates time and space...so, visually stunning at first, then cold and twisted the more you dive in. Very troubling.

[PreacherGriff]

From my understanding on how these things work, it's basically sampling/learning from existing images based off some sort of tagging system. So it seems that most religious art matching key words in your prompt that the program uses happens to lean heavily into the sailing/boats symbolism of Christianity. It also seems to focus on the artistic motifs without understanding the context, meaning it invokes genre specific feelings unintentionally and sometimes only manages to get it in the ballpark.

All that being said I think you'd get some interesting results if you specified certain artists or genres in the prompt. Just giving it Scripture on its own I think is just signaling it to pull from generic mainstream Christian themed art.

[chadcrigger]

this was our lesson from Sunday school last Sunday. 😅 it is one of my favorites stories about Jesus. The biggest takeaway I get from this story is do not have fear or doubt . God has you in his arms no matter how dark or stormy your life becomes. Keep your eye on him and you will never falter. God bless and keep you .

[chriswood]

You telling the story with the pictures was excellent! Amazing, and gorgeous pictures. 🎉🎉🎉

[brianfarley]

Would love to see the Book of Revelation done. I bet that would be amazing

[ATEN_DNAR]

By the looks of it, AI generated art has a more positive view of the bible than most Americans at this point.

[webvideocritic]

If you type all the verses at once it understands and gives a beautiful image

[rhondagardner]

I just finished watching your video in its entirety. I must say it turned out beautiful and your editing with the sound effects and music just brought it to life. So beautiful and peaceful. Shalom & Thank you

[MinuteMan]

A man in my former church use to do large chalk drawings while he when through a passage in the Bible. They always turned out beautiful. The difference in the experience for me was, I understood this man to be a redeemed follower of Jesus and he was doing it out of obedience and love and inspiration from the Holy Spirit. Watching and waiting to see what the AI would draw actually gave me a slight sense of anxiety.

[hkenn]

Do stuff like this more. I dont know what that means exactly, but this different/more casual side of you was fun as well as your other material.

[OMEGALFA.]

Thanks for doing this, Matt. Very interesting results. Looks like the AI is not overly biased for it against the Bible. I've been trying to figure out how credits are charged per AI image request. Is it a standard set rate or request?

[michaelmccarthy]

So good I’d like a whole series of videos of you doing this

[ruththomas]

I would love to see Ezekiel's visit from the flying machine. And the description of the two creatures in Job.

[lyntate]

The first image gave me goosebumps! It also seemed to “understand” who was being written about by the clothes that were generated - it hit on the correct time period. Awesome video and interesting results. God bless!

[PamelaPayne-psdl]

Matt, I actually was surprised enjoyed the AI interpretation of the text... along with your sound effects.... VERY NICE

[hermitlifeinthemountainsub]

I LOVED IT! I can't wait to see more! Maybe you can do one of Mother Mary. I want to see what the art generator creates of her image.

[chakra]

Wow. Thirty minutes ago I didn't even know a.i. art generators were a thing. But then, a your videos show me a lot of things I never imagined existed.

[DemoVD]

Here's a hint, you can add certain things to the description like "perfect face, realistic, style of ___, etc" and there should be a negative prompt (though I'm not familiar with this specific generator) that allows you to put in things you don't want such as "mutilated body, more than 5 fingers, etc" and there is a technique for every generator that if you add on {prompt} or [prompt] or (prompt) it will either increase or decrease the importance of a specific word or phrase, those it's different for every one. If you use the increase bracket around the negative prompts, it will further decrease the risk of having that specific prompt you don't want. It's complicated, but can make it much more eerie when you get into the realistic stuff... Especially if you get mutilated figures... I've gotten things that just looking at it gives me an adrenaline rush and I feel like I wanna run away.

But good job. Jesus is so incredibly well established in art that it's hard to say the name and not get that image when you type it meaning someone else, like from Spain or Mexico, even if their last name is different.

[MicahScottPnD]

Matt, thanks for this, as i don't have access to the technology but very much want to know what it does! I got some exposure through this video

[skeller]

This is super cool! Definitely going to generate my own images