Artificial intelligence has captured much of the world’s attention in recent months. ChatGPT, DALL-E, Midjourney—these tools have all made quite the splash. Some of us have adopted them with open arms looking for ways to make things more efficient, some of us have kept them at an arm’s length, weary of the ethicality of it all.
We’re personally still trying to make sense of where AI fits and how it can and should be used, but we figured we’d try to take some cues from Jesus. It struck us, Jesus used the tools available to him in redemptive ways. Roman roads were built by occupiers to move armies—Jesus used them to travel far and wide sharing his message. A simple boat built for fishing—Jesus used it as a platform from which to speak. Twelve ragtag, ordinary people with messy pasts—Jesus placed them at the center of the work he was doing. Jesus was less interested in what the world said about a person or thing and more about how it could show the kind of love he was interested in. So this video was our attempt to do the same. Whether AI is messy, confusing, harmless, or not, how could we use it to talk about the kind of love Jesus talked about?
We started by asking an artificial intelligence image generator to show us pictures of “love.” Just a one-word prompt. The results were very abstract, flowery, and fake. At first, we were disappointed in the AI, but then we realized the AI is trained on real images out in the real world — if the AI’s depiction of love feels fake, it’s because fake love is what we’ve shown it. So, we regrouped and tried something else. We gave the AI text prompts that were simply Jesus’ own words describing love. We were floored by the results. Not because they’re perfect—some of the images are admittedly haunting, others a bit surreal, but they are all reflective of a deeper, more real love than what we got out of the AI before—a love that is active, selfless, and 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. That kind of love is complex and hard to fathom, impossible to fully capture in 1 picture or 1000, but still he lived it out.
We’re still not sure what to think of all this new AI stuff, but for us, visualizing Jesus’ love in comparison to the commercialized, fluffy, romantic love we’re inundated with was a confirmation that what Jesus spoke about and lived out is worth emulating.
*All the images shown were created using Midjourney. All text prompts shown are the real text prompts used for each corresponding image.
