AI-Generated Bible Art

https://www.openbible.info/labs/ai-bible-art/

by possiblelion • 4 years ago

193 94 4 years ago

Dalle generated images from specific Bible quote prompts. This website (openbible) is really fascinating overall, I recommend checking out their different sections.

ars5• 4 years ago

Unfortunately that's not what it is.

If you hover the mouse over the image you will see the actual prompt - which is a human, Christian, interpretation of the verse, not the actual verse.

I am disappointed.

(I say Christian because no Jew would ever give that prompt for "Expulsion from Eden".)

bustadjustme• 4 years ago

Note that the prompt is AI-generated as well, though. From the linked blog post:

OpenAI has another AI, GPT-3, that I used to generate many of the ideas for DALL·E prompts. I wanted to explore DALL·E using a wide variety of styles and artists, and I have limitations and biases when it comes to my knowledge of art history. GPT-3 cast a wider net of styles and artists than I would’ve come up with on my own.... The GPT-3 prompts I used evolved over time, but this one is emblematic:
Suggest 5 unique concept ideas for a work of visual art inspired by Luke 14:7-11 (do not pick the place of honor) in the Bible. Include art direction and a specific medium and artist to emulate. Include artists from a variety of eras, styles, and media. Try for an unusual perspective. Title, year, medium. Description.

visarga3• 4 years ago

Not just the Bible, I expect many fans to start generating illustrations for their favourite novels.

joemazerino• 4 years ago

Very cool.

what-imright• 4 years ago

I’m pretty concerned about a AI generating infectious memes and memeplexes/religions. It doesn’t take much to start a religious genocide. Look at Hong Xiuquan, the brother of jesus from China. 30 million dead. Synthetic religion could be so convincing it sucks us all into some delusion

yboris• 4 years ago

This may be the best book to read on the topic: Breaking the Spell by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. In short: religion is a meme (that has evolved over centuries). Crudely put, one can draw some parallels between religion "infecting" a human and a virus that makes an ant crawl to the top of a blade of grass (as the virus needs a sheep's stomach to reproduce).

https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Spell-Religion-Natural-Pheno...

olddustytrail2• 4 years ago

And you know what another dangerous meme is? Humour. You can make offensive and degrading remarks about pretty much anything.

But no one wants to admit they are not infected with the humour meme.

trasz• 4 years ago

Humor isn’t harmful. There were no genocides in the name of humor. It doesn’t destroy peoples lives. It doesn’t promote unhealthy behaviors, and doesn’t cripple peoples’ ability to understand the reality around them.

api• 4 years ago

They all look like psychedelic album covers. I would listen to every one of them.

guestbest• 4 years ago

Has anyone created psychedelic AI generated music?

smoldesu• 4 years ago

Yes, the results have been really mixed.

On the one hand, you have people trying to generate MIDI compositions with AI. This works alright, but a machine-learning model doesn't understand which musical cues are significant and which are not. We have no good 'classification' metrics for music, which means that most procgen MIDI tunes are listenable, but about as boring as Chinese bootleg NES soundtracks circa late-80s.

On the other hand, you have people actually trying to recreate actual music a-la DALL-E or Stable Diffusion. This has slightly better results (since AI has an easier time parsing a finished product), but still pretty far away from being interesting to the ear. There's plenty of examples on YouTube, you'll probably get the gist after just 1 or 2 of them.

All of this really goes to show what a serendipitous project AI image generation has been. On it's face, we're frankly solving a really simple problem; how do we make a black box that can identify visual parameters and then synthesize their consequences in a photo? The nuance involved with making interesting music is a much different arena though, and I reckon that we simply don't have advanced enough classification to make it work.

tmountain• 4 years ago

I love this, and I have been enjoying DALL-E quite a bit, but does anyone else feel like AI art has a distinct look to it? I can't really put my finger on it, but it invokes an almost unsettling feeling that I don't get from traditional artwork.

ars5• 4 years ago

It's because it's easy to see how it takes an existing artwork and modifies it.

For example when asked to paint Noah it used a stereotypical image of last century Jews. How would it know that Noah is linked with Jews, if not by finding another painting labeled Noah and working off of that?

dougmwne3• 4 years ago

This is where it gets interesting. The model is just 4.5gb. That’s too small to contain the actual trillion images it was trained on. So in all likelihood, it doesn’t have an actual specific image of Noah to work from, but a web of concepts, connections, correlations. It’s probably analogous to if you were asked to draw a picture in the style of Da Vinci. Most peoples’ brains can’t reproduce the exact image, but a low fidelity representation of it that they can fill in with imagination.

If you run the same prompt multiple times you can start to see evidence of this. The images are similar but also clearly different, not at all a quick transformation of an existing image.

aaroninsf3• 4 years ago

Not to your point,

I advocate for being more precise in the language we use when talking about how these systems function.

These systems do not in any literal way "encode" or index or otherwise store specific images; they have incomprehensibly (to us) distributed representations representing aggregations over their training set.

The thrust of the observation is correct; but the specifics are very different, it's probably a more accurate "lay person" description to say something like, "the system was trained with only a few references for what Noah looked like, and doesn't have much initiative by default to improvise or make inferences, so if it tries in good faith to render Noah it is limited by what it's seen."

The point just being, it's less about making a collage or modifying a source, more about say 'doing its best to recapitulate a set of learned higher-level properties which are specific to the "Noah" concept.'

bkandel• 4 years ago

For me a lot of it is in the eyes and face. There's almost always some weird deformation or artifact that doesn't look quite right. It also happens in most other pictures if you look hard enough but with eyes and faces it's really unnerving.

amelius2• 4 years ago

Yes it's art that you get if you let a child make a broad sketch and let an experienced artist render all the details without looking at the whole result.

synu2• 4 years ago

There are definitely some characteristic deformations that only AI does. Sort of cubist repeating of elements at transition points.

planetsprite• 4 years ago

I think it's the fact that you can subtly pick up the way Dall-e has begun to understand the similarity between different abstract forms. Dall-e has likely intuited that there is a general similarity between the faces of different animals, or a general similarity between different organic objects and different artificial ones. We are seeing the expression of those connections the model has made: compression in abstract representation that triggers the same uneasy feeling human brains get when on a bad trip and they see faces in clouds and shadows.

The training of these image generation models minimizes the amount of necessary new visual information it needs to remember with each new image it sees during training, so whenever it sees a new image-caption pair it abstracts its qualities into an amalgamation of what its already seen. This is how Stable Diffusion managed to fit the complete corpus of human visual memory into 4.2 gigabytes.

Everything is more closely connection than the picture would imply at first glace, like how in Super Mario Bros. the bushes are just clouds colored green. Compression and efficiency leads to a hyperconnectivity in the way DALL-E ties prompts and images. This is why those old deep-dream images where everything looked like a dog's face were so unsettling. This triggers an uncanny response in the human brain, because it sees the vague shape of a face in a tree, or the vague shape of a body in the structure of a building.

jp57• 4 years ago

So interesting that Adam and Eve are clothed. Of course this is easily explained if most of the training data contains clothed people and if the prompts don't explicitly say they should be nude. But I wonder, can DALL-E produce nudes, or has it been prevented somehow?

vorpalhex2• 4 years ago

StableDiffusion can, with tweaks, but not very well. You know the issue where it isn't quite sure how many legs people have? Yeah that applies to.. other.. body parts too.

rtev• 4 years ago

I think that’s a feature!

milsorgen• 4 years ago

I've seen some pretty good (and tasteful) stuff out of SD on some forums. Not sure how much time people are spending to get that output but I've been impressed with some of the human forms in general people are getting.

becquerel• 4 years ago

Sorry guys, I asked them not to include me in their training set, but...

andsoitis2• 4 years ago

Nudes are prevented, at least on my account.

Art galleries and museums around the world are amused.

cma• 4 years ago

OpenAI trained up DALL-E 2's morality policy on the biography of John Ashcroft.

zikduruqe• 4 years ago

Ezekiel 23:20 would be interesting.

dqpb2• 4 years ago

It does beg the question, did God create the loom on the fifth day, so they could immediately clothe themselves, or on the seventh day, after their exact dimensions were known?

ars5• 4 years ago

They clothed themselves with fig leaves. (Genesis 3:7) This is also why some hold that the tree of knowledge was a fig tree.

Other possibilities are grape (and the fruit was actually wine that they drank), or wheat because when it's when a baby first starts eating solids that they start really understanding the world around them.

folbec2• 4 years ago

Appropriately soppy and generic.

folbec2• 4 years ago

for those who can read french :

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_sulpicien

speedgoose• 4 years ago

And for those who can’t: https://www.deepl.com/

vorpalhex2• 4 years ago

I wonder if we will see AI generated art replace a lot of stock photo usage...

marcodiego• 4 years ago

I wonder the impact DALL-E will have on abstract art. Maybe we'll see a severe devaluation of abstract artists since most people will be unable to differentiate human from computer generated art.

andybak• 4 years ago

That has always been the case to some degree (I remember Douglas Hofstadter asking people to distinguish synthetic Mondrian vs real Mondrian several decades ago).

I think what's changed is actually somewhat more radical. Most people will soon be unable to differentiate human from computer generated representational art.

i_like_apis2• 4 years ago

Soon we will create our own god.

krapp3• 4 years ago

We created all of our gods.

i_like_apis2• 4 years ago

True. The new ones won’t just be fantasies, though.

ipnon• 4 years ago

Do androids pray to electronic gods?

no-dr-onboard• 4 years ago

At first glance I was relatively amazed at how beautiful and imaginitive some of these works are. After returning to the HN comments and reading the quip about how the prompts are oddly specific (and verifying myself) my amazement quickly diffused :/.

ghostfacekeller• 4 years ago

The blog post linked from the page mentions the prompts came from GPT-3

k__• 4 years ago

Stably, I hope.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

This is cool, but why make illustrations of biblical scenes in a style that has already been done hundreds, if not thousands of times by human painters? Why not do like a full illustration of the bible in vaporwave, or in the style of a Wes Anderson movie?

aaroninsf3• 4 years ago

OMG the Wes Anderson bible.

Take my mon—er upvote.

amelius2• 4 years ago

And let GPT-3 apply a style change to the text while you're at it.

ben_w3• 4 years ago

Me:

Rewrite the book of Genesis in the style of a limerick

GPT-3:

   There was a man named Adam
   Who was the first of all men
   He lived in a garden
   With his wife, Eve
   And they ate an apple
   And then they had to leave

aaroninsf3• 4 years ago

Vaguely related:

I have been contemplating that if-when I get to participate in another D&D campaign,

it would be both easy and amazing to use MidJourney (or whatever), to prepare art for sessions and/or even make it on the fly as needed.

The lag between notion, and serviceable rendering with the right set of details...

...but not so much that night-before preparation of a half-dozen choice/likely images would be a burden.

And "realtime" is just going to get closer.

gylterud• 4 years ago

Indeed – the first thing I did in Midjourney was to create this for my upcomming D&D campaign, set in a dessert world: https://hakon.gylterud.net/img/dessert_mindflayer-scaled.jpg

dqpb2• 4 years ago

I wonder where OpenAI’s moral decree on AI-Generated Quran Art would land.

ducktective• 4 years ago

The writing on the wall ? :\

scop• 4 years ago

I would love to see AI's attempt at Ezekiel's vision in chapter 1.

mikotodomo2• 4 years ago

Wouldn't you stop believing in god after seeing this if you were a Christian? It just proves that we are just machines. Our feelings are just chemical reactions. All someone had to do was a bunch of math to make a program emulate a human.

wsgeorge• 4 years ago

I'm not sure how this necessarily leads to a disbelief in the Christian God, because...

All someone had to do was a bunch of math to make a program emulate a human.

Christian theology says that, that "someone" who did it first was God. And,

It just proves that we are just machines.

fits quite nicely with the idea that creation is subordinate to the Deity that made it.

mikotodomo2• 4 years ago

But there is no soul if we are all machines. There is no heaven. You just die and there will be a black screen.

aliasxneo• 4 years ago

Well, I suppose I fit into this category, and the answer is no, it does not.

schoen• 4 years ago

I think this is technically an invalid syllogism.

People can create art.

Machines can create art.

Therefore, people are machines.

But it's true that lots of things have happened in science and engineering over time that have reduced humanity's sense of uniqueness and specialness. And some of those things have also been challenging for traditional religious belief. However, they don't necessarily disprove the religious belief, they just undermine certain intuitions that are highly compatible with it (like that a certain kind of human uniqueness must be a direct consequence of the divine plan).

huetius• 4 years ago

I’m going to answer as if you’re arguing in good faith.

In the theology of Antonio Rosmini, God places within humans the principle of universal being, by which we participate in the light of reason, which enobles us with the ability to think about concepts that are beyond our quite limited selves.

Of course, there is also something mysteriously wrong with human beings, such that our own efforts always betray the infinity of which intuitively conceive. This ought to give us pause as we try to create machines with human-like or super-human-like qualities.

unethical_ban4• 4 years ago

I wish the UI allowed easier reading, selection and copying of the full prompt. "Hover for img-alt" is not mobile friendly nor share-friendly, nor friendly for old eyes.

The project itself is very interesting.

throw7• 4 years ago

Don't the orthodox have approved way/rules of creating biblical art? It would be interesting to restrict the ai-generation to those set of rules.

mike_hock• 4 years ago

"You will not fear the terror of night"

KEK. It drew a manga.

Also KEK:

Birth of Christ

As an old RPG

The parable of the lost sheep

That steampunk sheep

The Last Supper

In a sci-fi conference room in Manhattan

kerblang• 4 years ago

I hadn't noticed this before with AI art, but the faces are all deformed. The animals are practically headless.

jjuliano• 4 years ago

LORD is a title, not a name. FYI.

For example, Psa 83:18, the name of God was replaced by generic title 'the LORD' like a wildcard, so it reads "Let them know that you, WHOSE NAME is the Lord—". so it can also written as "Let them know that you, WHOSE NAME is the SOFTWARE ENGINEER".

Who is the immortal living and true God in the Bible behind that LORD you are addressing/devoting to? There are millions of false/dead God nowadays who can't help you, but only one true living God exists that will. It is important to know. Being specific is more helpful, genuine and sincere, than vaguely calling a generic wildcard title (in which, God has every right to not respond, since your devoted addressee is questionable.).

Research: See the correlation between the Isa 42:8, Exo 3:15, Matthew 6:9, John 12:28, John 17:26, Pro 18:10, Joel 2:32, Micah 4:5, Acts 15:4, and Psa 83:18. See that the generic wildcard name does not fit the picture, and understand how important it is for us to use God's personal name.

tsol• 4 years ago

This is neat. Honestly though.. they're not very good. They're rather all rather generic and many of them aren't illustrating the verse very clearly. It makes sense-- DALLE prompts tend to be very specific and it looks like for the most part they just used bible verses while attaching phrases like Classical Art, Painting, 2022, etc. With more work by the author to create a more specific prompt you can probably make some really great stuff

lethologica• 4 years ago

I get a very Clipart vibe from a lot of these.

kakwa_• 4 years ago

I'm really wondering how many out of these are almost copy pastes of existing pictures. I just saw down the list an almost verbatim copy of the well known photo of the heart in the Amazon, so I'm really skeptical.

narrator• 4 years ago

Death of Jezebel doesn't really go with the rest: https://a.openbible.info/labs/ai-bible-art/1024/death-jezebe...

nahuel0x• 4 years ago

What happens when instead of an static sacred book you have a sacred oracle who can generate any image and can answer all your questions? One whose way of work is even a mystery to his creators. Probably we will see new cults and religions welling up around AI.

MatthewCampbell• 4 years ago

Cue TempleOS

CobrastanJorji• 4 years ago

TempleOS has a number of interesting Oracular things. The F7 button gives you a random Bible word, and Shift+F7 gives you a random Bible passage. The author claimed that God provided guidance through this functionality.

Lower down, TempleOS's "god" library was a 'random' number generator that was seeded/pre-populated with the entirety of the KJV. The "GodBits" function would get you "random" numbers from it.

userbinator• 4 years ago

Amusingly, https://a.openbible.info/labs/ai-bible-art/1024/let-land-pro... looks more like loaves of bread wrapped in plastic bags on the near shore, and on the far shore, that along with bits of rubbish.

sorokod• 4 years ago

Shame,no flaming sword in the Expulsion from Eden images.

AI-Generated Bible Art

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