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AI-Generated Bible Art

193 points| possiblelion | 3 years ago |openbible.info | reply

113 comments

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[+] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] amelius|3 years ago|reply
And let GPT-3 apply a style change to the text while you're at it.
[+] aaroninsf|3 years ago|reply
OMG the Wes Anderson bible.

Take my mon—er upvote.

[+] tmountain|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] planetsprite|3 years ago|reply
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.

[+] synu|3 years ago|reply
There are definitely some characteristic deformations that only AI does. Sort of cubist repeating of elements at transition points.
[+] ars|3 years ago|reply
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?

[+] bkandel|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] amelius|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] aaroninsf|3 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jp57|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] vorpalhex|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] andsoitis|3 years ago|reply
Nudes are prevented, at least on my account.

Art galleries and museums around the world are amused.

[+] zikduruqe|3 years ago|reply
Ezekiel 23:20 would be interesting.
[+] dqpb|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] api|3 years ago|reply
They all look like psychedelic album covers. I would listen to every one of them.
[+] guestbest|3 years ago|reply
Has anyone created psychedelic AI generated music?
[+] possiblelion|3 years ago|reply
Dalle generated images from specific Bible quote prompts. This website (openbible) is really fascinating overall, I recommend checking out their different sections.
[+] visarga|3 years ago|reply
Not just the Bible, I expect many fans to start generating illustrations for their favourite novels.
[+] ars|3 years ago|reply
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".)

[+] nahuel0x|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] marcodiego|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
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.

[+] tsol|3 years ago|reply
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|3 years ago|reply
I get a very Clipart vibe from a lot of these.
[+] unethical_ban|3 years ago|reply
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.

[+] jjuliano|3 years ago|reply
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.

[+] ipnon|3 years ago|reply
Do androids pray to electronic gods?
[+] no-dr-onboard|3 years ago|reply
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 :/.
[+] k__|3 years ago|reply
Stably, I hope.
[+] ghostfacekeller|3 years ago|reply
The blog post linked from the page mentions the prompts came from GPT-3
[+] vorpalhex|3 years ago|reply
I wonder if we will see AI generated art replace a lot of stock photo usage...
[+] scop|3 years ago|reply
I would love to see AI's attempt at Ezekiel's vision in chapter 1.
[+] throw7|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] kerblang|3 years ago|reply
I hadn't noticed this before with AI art, but the faces are all deformed. The animals are practically headless.
[+] dqpb|3 years ago|reply
I wonder where OpenAI’s moral decree on AI-Generated Quran Art would land.