What is love? Apologies (or you’re welcome) if that immediately got a certain earworm stuck in your head, but the question is serious. What is love? It’s a complicated word. We use it to mean a million different things. Sometimes we feel it, sometimes we show it, sometimes we receive it, sometimes we do it — that’s a lot for four letters to hold.
So, we decided we’d try and find out — what does love usually mean when we use it? There might not be a way to answer that question with confidence, but we found a way that we think gets us close. To determine what we usually mean when we talk about love, we asked AI. It sounds backward, but stick with us. Generative AI models are trained on massive sets of human data. They sort of act as a sophisticated mirror. So, we stared into the mirror and asked AI to imagine love. It came back with very ethereal, romantic, flowery images — images that represent a cliche version of love that isn’t real at all. And if AI is showing us artificial love, it’s because artificial love is what we’ve shown it.
But surely love can be so much more than what we saw in those fake pictures, right? So, we regrouped and tried something else. We gave the AI text prompts that were simply the way Jesus loved. We were floored by the results. Not because they’re perfect — some of the images are a bit surreal or strange — but because they’re all reflective of a deeper, more real love than what we got out of the AI before — a love that is active, selfless, and honestly difficult.
You see, Jesus didn’t just love his friends and family. He loved the sick, the poor, the people he knew wouldn’t love him back; he even loved the people who tortured and killed him. He loved them all at their best and at their worst. He laughed with them; he cried with them; he forgave them. That kind of love is complex and hard to fathom, impossible to fully capture in one picture or 1,000, but still, he lived it out. If that kind of love is something that intrigues you, you can learn more about it here.
*All the images shown were created using Midjourney
