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

hey everybody it's Matt thanks for hanging out with me on my YouTube channel we're gonna do something really weird today I'm sitting here playing with artificial intelligence generated art I've been doing this for the last several hours I've tried a bunch of these different AI art generators of course I'm troubled by this I'm also intrigued by this and it's another one of these things that we can sit around and talk about how dangerous and how this might corrupt the soul of civil society and how this might do damage to Art and Artistry and human expression there are all kinds of implications to artificial intelligence particularly artificial intelligence generated art that are worth reflecting on but something I was sitting here feeling really curious about is I'm wondering how deeply embedded or to what degree Christian thought biblical ethics Bible stories theology theism in general I'm wondering how much that is embedded in the machine learning that undergirds these AI art generators what happens if you go there and ask it to think theologically or ask it to tell a story so this is what I decided I was going to do today I am grabbing a copy of the English Standard Version and I've picked a story I'm gonna go with Matthew 8 23 through 27 this is the story of Jesus calming a storm I think it's visually interesting it is also concise so I I think we can slice it into verses or partial verses that will allow us to get a look at what just what happens what is this AI art generator create and what I'm looking for is to see one does it look cool like is it is it neat does it tell a story is there something here is there is there something on some kind of human level that is provocative because you don't just make AI art out of the blue you have to prompt it at this point with something I guess that I would say is human and so I'm going to prompt AI art with something that is a Christian I believe was inspired supernaturally by God and we're going to see what it churns out and what we end up with in terms of how it relays the story of Jesus calming the storm I'm recording my monitor here so you can see this in real time as well I what do we do like just for now what do you think do I do I just go straight with the text and when he got into the boat his disciples followed him uh it's not going to know that we're talking about Jesus so I'm going to say and when Jesus got into the boat his disciples followed him uh that's it I'm not going to give it any more prompting that's it I want to say like see if Galilee Capernaum but yeah Matthew all of those prompts would be interesting but I'm just going with the text the only thing I've changed is instead of the pronoun he which comes right on the heels of the previous sentence so it's clearly talking about Jesus verse 22 and Jesus said to him follow me and leave the dead to bury their own dead so he in the next phrase is clearly Jesus I don't think I'm stretching anything I'm going to hit generate and then I will get back to you because this usually takes a minute or so I'm just going to speed ramp ahead show you what we got for the first verse of this story and find out if it's absolutely horrifying or maybe if somehow true stuff about God and faith comes through well look at that kind of beautiful now this is interesting because the boat on the right and I don't know why that boat is there like in terms of the biblical story uh I don't know why it's there but it's taking on water oh I see what we're doing oh so we've got the disciples in a boat here not 12 of them maybe half of them are in this other boat I don't know but it's like a shipwreck scene and Jesus is confidently standing up here at the front of the boat almost like he's giving guidance and comfort it's almost like we're combining two different things like Jesus teaching in Matthew 13 where he's you know gives all the famous Kingdom Parables it's kind of half that and half the calming of the storm scenario but in this scene it's almost like the calming of the storm is over because it looks like it's depicting a shipwreck like obviously this isn't going to be one for one and it's not one for one but it's not difficult to look at this image and assign theological meaning and Jesus is Savior and Fortress and refuge and the whole point of the calming the storm thing is to demonstrate that he has power over nature power to deliver on what he's claiming in The Sermon on the Mount that just wrapped up in chapter seven and that the power of Deliverance is included in that I don't know if that's an intentional a theological underpinning that we're getting here but it's not hard for me to read into it let's see what happens next verse 24 and behold there arose a great storm on the sea so that the boat spelled out right was being swamped by the waves but uh he was asleep I'm going with that whole verse there we go behold there arose a great storm on the sea so that the boat was being swamped by the waves but he was asleep wait I gotta download that I'm saving this one I'm going to try to show you the whole thing in sequence here at the end great generate I gotta say I'm not exactly horrified by that first painting it has some glitchy quirky stuff that goes beyond the boundaries of just very loose Impressions and feelings that sometimes artists will paint in there's a few things that just look like um what are you doing here but oh okay here's our next image and it's just a c there's nothing to it it's a Seascape it's a beautiful one and what kind of medium is that trying to imitate does it look like oil paint to you I I guess maybe in the brush Strokes I don't know it's kind of hard to put my finger on it the waves down here in the foreground look like maybe a a knife with some titanium white yeah I watched Bob Ross and the kind of that scraping motion to make the waves but um hey look at this though in the right there it looks like there is land in the background so maybe this is still functioning within the context of the Sea of Galilee there's nowhere you can go on the Sea of Galilee that you can't see land in all directions it's just a bowl that of water that sits surrounded by stuff so yeah I don't know if it knows that it's depicting the Sea of Galilee but yeah that's a good enough storm to swamp a fishing boat all right and they went and woke him saying this is verse 25. save us Lord semicolon we are perishing wow I'm about to hit generate but I gotta remember that this is happening divorced from any other context right so I'm using fotor.com fotor and it's been my favorite of everything that I've tried so far but is this compounding do we have a whole session going here do I have a relationship with the AI where it's gradually triangulating what I'm talking about thematically with each entry or are these one-offs I assume they're one-offs but I don't know so I am going to take the liberty of tweaking pronouns again and the disciples went and woke Jesus saying save us Lord we are perishing I think those are fair tweaks let's see what we get so far it's beautiful the two images think could mesh together into some kind of I mean they're cohesive that is oh your faces oh no this is a disaster oh it doesn't know we're on a boat yuck it's like there are three Jesus's and they all have monster teeth something went very wrong here I'm I'm not inspired uh okay I'm gonna hmm what's the experiment you and I are doing here can I tweak it I I'm going to I'm going to mess with this a little bit uh and the disciples in the boat went to wake Jesus saying Lord we are perishing because of this storm we fear our boat will sink okay I understand that is not what the text says but everything I'm saying there is clearly entoned from the text so let's try it again and hopefully we don't get any more of that creepy sarlacc pit mouth I mean this is why your reformed crowd is probably like hey no images of Jesus it's just too dangerous and I certainly don't like what AI just gave us it was gross okay cool I I think I could tell what this scene is just from what I'm getting here we've got one character who appears to be illuminated the other characters seem to be preoccupied with what's happening at C the little sale is all tattered and look at this storm it's like mountains over here it's it's kind of good art it's not perfect but if it tells the story and it evokes something that's pretty good do I see theological themes again I feel like I can read in some stuff from the Psalms pretty easily the idea of like a Comfort or a Safe Harbor from a storm that's pretty neat all right let's keep going and he okay I'm going to continue to exercise our agreed upon decision to replace pronouns so that this makes sense so and Jesus said to his disciples it actually says and he said to them why are you afraid oh you of little faith I'm just going to do that half of the verse and Jesus let's go with this give it a little more context standing in the boat that was sinking I don't know that's too strong being tossed about by the waves that's biblical language standing in the boat that was being tossed about the by the wave said to the disciples why are you afraid oh you have little faith see what we got uh this just doesn't make I mean it just doesn't know what to do with this scene so there are no disciples here for him to be talking to I mean it looks a lot like depictions of Jesus from the 19th and early 20th century what are those things out there other ships have been wrecked out there there's there's a boat that's crazy though that boat that's in front of him looks a lot like the uh magdala boat if you go to Israel there's a fishing boat there from the era of the early First Century A.D that has that kind of build is pretty impressive that they got that close and then he's got this cute little robot dinghy kind of thing here I don't know what's going on it almost looks like he's actually walking on water here wait a minute yeah there's no sand there's no Beach and look at how these boats are sitting up they're not beached does it know that Jesus walks on water I hmm I'm intrigued it looks like there's like a lion or a tiger prow on that one ship that's in trouble way out there as well okay interesting hey we got what we got moving on then Jesus this is the second half of verse 26 Rose and rebuked the winds and the sea and there was a great calm I gotta I gotta tell it that he's in a boat Rose in the boat okay well that's just lovely and again compatible visually with everything else we've seen but where did everybody go I wonder if the AI art took it as I wonder if it heard Jesus and then saw the word rose that the ESV uses for um for getting up from his Slumber and connected Jesus and Rose and like imagined we were doing an Ascension scene like from the end of Luke and the beginning of Acts but in a boat on the Sea of Galilee it's it's beautiful I mean it obviously really fixated on the word calm all right well pressing on my friends and the disciples marveled saying what sort of man is this that even winds and C obey him I've got to give that context um it just it's gonna have no idea where we are here um and after Jesus calmed the storm the disciples in the boat marveled saying I don't think I'm stretching it beyond the given meaning of the text but I Gotta Give it something to let it latch onto this when we started I was like well we'll just type the thing in and it kind of sets the scene but the further along we go with each of these being a one-off it just it's not going to know where we are or what we're doing hopefully I'm not ruining the experiment okay rough outing with faces it looks like Jesus eyes are a mustache one two three four five six seven eight nine so we got nine disciples Maybe three more of them are off screen there maybe we have 12 disciples here looks again like Jesus isn't in the boat interesting does it know that Jesus walked on water why wouldn't you put him in the boat that I mean I wonder if I said I'm gonna I'm gonna check this in just a second I wonder if I said and after the man calmed the storm yeah let's try taking Jesus out of the equation that sentence sounded gross for me as a Christian but I think you know what I mean what are the two sticks here before we move on why are we is this are those ores I mean they're a little skinny for oars I don't I don't know what that means I don't understand what we're supposed to take from that and it still looks like Jesus is the one who's talking and teaching not like the disciples are marveling but maybe they're saying it to themselves let's try this and after the man calmed the storm the other men in the boat marveled saying what sort of man is this let's see if this puts Jesus in the boat or if the machine learning behind this art generator is leaping right to having Jesus walking on water because I specifically said Jesus were Vixen to find out whoa this is like some kind of uh modern era steam punk Master and Commander what on Earth are we doing here this looks like something out of Dune if it were set in the ocean or Mad Max if it were set in the ocean it looks like this is uh like a flying machine from a final fantasy video game wow you take Jesus out of the equation and it looks like the machine learning got confused really quickly oh that's fascinating so while I wasn't completely satisfied with what we were getting it looks like that name is something that is known well enough by the machine learning that uh that it informed the way it made the art I'm going to stitch all this together I'm just going to read this text and do a little dramatic reading here at the end and just give you these images in a row and see what you make of it there are obviously a lot of implications to this but again my curiosity is is just about what this machine has learned and can it think in theological categories and what happens when we take something that we as humans created from the raw materials God created and put this thing we made kind of in our own image in touch with the language of God in whose image we are made that's a lot to take in I'll leave you with this reading and these images and I mean this very sincerely I cannot wait to hear what you have to say down in the comments Matthew 8 23-27 and when Jesus got into the boat his disciples followed him and behold there arose a great storm on the sea so that the boat was being swamped by the waves but he was asleep they went and woke him saying save us Lord we're perishing and he said to them why are you afraid of you of little faith and he rose he rebuked of the Winds and the Sea and there was a great calm the men marveled saying what sort of man is this that even the winds and the Sea obey him

Channel: Matt Whitman

Views: 2,970,979

Keywords: Bible, Theology, Study, Matt Whitman, TMBH, No Dumb Questions, Matthew, Jesus

Id: s0AqlK_gCbU

Length: 20min 34sec (1234 seconds)

Published: Tue Dec 13 2022