I have grade school offspring that can draw better than me, and because of the accident of God ordained gifts (or lack thereof), I’ve been a little envious of those who are in a position to create meaningful, powerful art.
Several posts ago I discussed how art creation is on the precipice of being radically changed by AI. As mentioned in that post, AI has the potential to create art from descriptions, opening the door to us rubes to participate. It still has a ways to go, but we have an early version that can actually give some good results.
The use of AI raises all sorts of philosophy of art questions about attribution. By having the idea, getting a sense of the process, and selecting descriptions that I think will yield good results, am I the artist? Even if the process itself had an automated, lifeless, component? A seminal moment in art history was when accomplished artist Duchamp submitted a urinal with the signature “R Mutt” to an art show, after that point everything was fair game for being considered “art,” and the use of AI could fall in the same camp. But in terms of attribution, who is the artist? Nobody hunted down the urinal maker that created the piece to give him or her credit, but perhaps the code writers or image generators online that supplied the raw material have more of a claim to being the “artist.”
But to be honest, I don’t care. This isn’t my world, this isn’t going on my CV, so earlier than I expected, here I present my first AI Church art show, where I type scriptural phrases into the image generator.
Results vary (for example, typing Kolob only shows images of Kolob canyon), but after a little while you get a sense of how it plays with the inputs.
Eternal Lives in the Eternal Worlds
Immortality and Eternal Life of Man
Darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters
I really like this one, I think it powerfully conveys the theme of the Gods bringing organization and light to primordial dark, watery chaos that is found in Hebrew cosmology and throughout the world.
Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky
So God created mankind in his own image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them.
Descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and as the sand on the seashore.
This one is probably my favorite.
Stephen, are those the same inputs you typed, or just titles you gave each image? I’m also kind of curious about how the selection of training data affects the images. Cool idea in any case.
Those are the actual inputs I typed. I assume for stuff like this the training data is taken from images all across the web.
I love this. Dall-E is my new favorite thing. Thank you for this idea and for the images. Beautiful.
This is fun. I may have to play with it for future blog post images