AI will show you the face of God

A niche Youtube channel is using generative AI to create “living” images of the Bible. It’s as tacky as it sounds

Artificial intelligence start-ups have promised a lot of things over the last couple of years. AI will be introduced to the classroom, we have been told, to help educate our children. It will save the NHS. It will revolutionise coding and data analysis and protein folding. It will make extremely average art to impress midwits. It will identify which STI you have if you send it a picture of your penis.¹

Now, you can add another heady promise to the list: artificial intelligence will usher in a new age of religiosity courtesy of “The AI Bible”, a Youtube channel using generative AI to make “biblically accurate” renders of characters, things, stories from the Old Testament. “The AI Bible is a project to bring the Bible to life by inserting Bible Verses into AI Art Generators!” their channel bio chirps. Currently, the channel has about 185,000 Youtube subscribers and a million or so Instagram followers. I think there are plans for an app, too.

And what exactly does the Bible as envisioned by AI look like?, I hear you ask. Well, here’s “The Awakening of Adam”. The AI Bible cites Genesis 2:7-9 as the inspiration for this short video.²

It’s a bit silly and very twee, and for some reason the AI has decided that Adam would have looked like Mohamed Salah (why not?), but… I actually quite like this. This is the sort of ridiculous concept that makes AI really fun to mess around with.

Here’s a handful of biblically accurate angels:

Why is it somehow so camp? The angels all look like bosses from a sunnier version of Dark Souls. A four-headed lion on top of a fiery angel’s body, all set to an orchestral version of “Gangster’s Paradise” – surely this is the sort of thing that Martin Luther was trying to purge from the Catholic Church when he nailed the 95 Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, isn’t it? And yet you can never account for the implacability of human bad taste.

Here’s Moses parting the Red Sea, with a handy Hans Zimmer soundtrack stolen from Dune:

I think this one was tricky for the AI, to be honest. The water doesn’t look that good. But give it six months. I’m willing to bet the technology will have caught up.

There’s a new tabletop wargame causing a buzz online this month, called Trench Crusade. It’s a little like Warhammer – little grimdark miniatures fight each other according to turn-based dice rolls – except that it’s set in 1914, and it focuses on the combined forces of Christianity and Islam fighting against the armies of Hell in the Middle East, all vaguely dressed up in a World War One aesthetic (imagine guys dressed up in gas masks and spiked Prussian-style helmets thrusting bayonets spritzed with holy water into foul demons). Trench Crusade was crowdfunded through Kickstarter. Its creators sought a symbolic $66,666 to fund their game; in the end, they raised more than $3.3 million.

Check out the premise, as explained by the developers of the game:

In 1099 the Templars took the Holy City. Sealed deep within the catacombs beneath they discovered a blasphemous artifact which tested their faith, and found it wanting.

Blinded by greed and with weakness in their hearts, they fell to their knees in supplication to a new, blasphemous lord. The heretical band of Templars dared defy the Almighty and, casting aside their sacred vows, unleashed the forces of Hell upon Earth to begin war against humanity. Thus came the first Heresy and Jerusalem was reduced to a depraved pit where Hell and our mortal world bleed into one. Humanity rallied in a global holy war and halted the advance of the seemingly inexhaustible legions of the Damned.

Over 800 years later, in the Year of Our Lord 1914, this brutal, merciless war between the forces of Heaven and Hell rages on through trench warfare across vast swathes of pockmarked Europe. Mortal soldiers go over the top as weapons of terrifying power hammer both friend and foe alike. Supernatural beings wade through the carnage, their divine flesh impervious to all but the most blessed ammunition. Even with such incalculable might, the armies are at a stalemate and minor victories are snatched through daring raids and flank attacks.

Humanity, bolstered by the divine powers, wage endless battle to stop the legions of the Archdevils from overwhelming the Earth. This is not just a fight for survival, but a cataclysmic struggle that will decide the very fate of humanity's soul.

People love this heaven-versus-hell imagery, and they always have done. It’s sort of exciting. Is it a touch blasphemous? Probably, but that just heightens the sense of light subversion that the game carries with it. Despite everything, people still get a bit of a kick out of messing around with God.

And why not? New technology and means of expression have always been used didactically (evangelically, you might even say), to inspire and to thrill. In the mid-16^th century, the Council of Trent literally set out rules for new, simple, bold art in opposition to the Reformation, while their Protestant enemies mobilised the printing press and woodcuts to create mass media – mainly pamphlets – showing the Pope as a grotesque demon, often being sodomised by devils in a shit-encrusted vision of Hell (Midjourney has not yet been put to this task, that I know of). A hundred years later, Milton told the story of the Fall in ten thousand lines of blank verse. Christian rock and metal is a more recent example of contemporary artistic forms carrying a religious message. Hell, look at the number of (often excellent) writers on Substack itself who write about the re-Christianising of the West. People have always been after new ways to push old messages.

This woodcut by Lucas Cranach the Elder was commissioned by Martin Luther, and shows German peasants farting at the Pope in response to a papal decree.

A few more of these videos, because I like them. Here’s biblically accurate Satan, looking like a thirst-trap himbo from Final Fantasy:

Lot’s wife turning into a pillar of salt (they’ve taken the lyrics to “Skyfall” far too literally here):

Christ’s second coming, as told in Revelation, replete with laser eyes:

It’s all absolutely mad.

Although I understand the impulse to experiment with form, I couldn’t really imagine who the audience was for this when I first came across the channel – whether it was ironic or in earnest. Until I read the comments on Youtube, that is. Turns out it’s the latter.

Comments under that “return of Christ” video are – forgive me – positively rapturous. “I do not want to be on his bad side,” says one, “I repent of all my sins. Who can stand against the power of the LORD! Now is the time to accept his mercy.” Is this person joking? I don’t think so. Elsewhere, someone else has commented that “I can’t wait! My mom 86yrs old had a dream of Jesus in the sky on a white horse coming to get us and she said there were thousands of angels behind Him also on horses but He was in the front. She said it was absolutely beautiful!”

There has always been a trend in modern western Christianity towards what you might call the Marvel-fication of the Bible, and Christ himself. Just think of those peculiarly American megachurches where doughy youth pastors talk about how Jesus was the original superhero; how it was actually pretty neat that the LORD called down fire and brimstone on Sodom and Gomorrah, when you think about it. Churches where they present religious belief as part of an epic battle between good and evil, a battle for your very soul. Onward Christian Soldiers! they sing, except that the soldiers in this instance are akin to video game NPCs.

As someone for whom “Christianity” broadly means the staid, tea-and-biscuits, Songs of Praise pseudo-left-liberal stylings of Anglicanism – or what’s left of it – I find this stuff all to be baffling, but also fascinating. I look forward to the day that AI can show us the entire Biblical cycle, from Genesis to Revelation. Maybe I’ll even pray for it.

1. HeHealth, the company that promises to do this, claims to have 40,000 users and “the world’s largest medically annotated penile dataset”.

2. From the New International Version: “Then the Lord God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. Now the Lord God had planted a garden in the east, in Eden; and there he put the man he had formed. The Lord God made all kinds of trees grow out of the ground—trees that were pleasing to the eye and good for food. In the middle of the garden were the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”