[HN Gopher] AI-Generated Bible Art
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       AI-Generated Bible Art
        
       Author : possiblelion
       Score  : 154 points
       Date   : 2022-09-01 09:58 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.openbible.info)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.openbible.info)
        
       | api wrote:
       | They all look like psychedelic album covers. I would listen to
       | every one of them.
        
         | guestbest wrote:
         | Has anyone created psychedelic AI generated music?
        
           | smoldesu wrote:
           | Yes, the results have been really mixed.
           | 
           | On the one hand, you have people trying to generate MIDI
           | compositions with AI. This works alright, but a machine-
           | learning model doesn't understand which musical cues are
           | significant and which are not. We have no good
           | 'classification' metrics for music, which means that most
           | procgen MIDI tunes are listenable, but about as boring as
           | Chinese bootleg NES soundtracks circa late-80s.
           | 
           | On the other hand, you have people _actually trying_ to
           | recreate _actual music_ a-la DALL-E or Stable Diffusion. This
           | has slightly better results (since AI has an easier time
           | parsing a finished product), but still pretty far away from
           | being interesting to the ear. There 's plenty of examples on
           | YouTube, you'll probably get the gist after just 1 or 2 of
           | them.
           | 
           | All of this really goes to show what a serendipitous project
           | AI image generation has been. On it's face, we're frankly
           | solving a really simple problem; how do we make a black box
           | that can identify visual parameters and then synthesize their
           | consequences in a photo? The nuance involved with making
           | interesting music is a much different arena though, and I
           | reckon that we simply don't have advanced enough
           | classification to make it work.
        
       | aaroninsf wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | gylterud wrote:
         | Indeed - the first thing I did in Midjourney was to create this
         | for my upcomming D&D campaign, set in a dessert world:
         | https://hakon.gylterud.net/img/dessert_mindflayer-scaled.jpg
        
       | narrator wrote:
       | Death of Jezebel doesn't really go with the rest:
       | https://a.openbible.info/labs/ai-bible-art/1024/death-jezebe...
        
       | mikotodomo wrote:
       | Wouldn't you stop believing in god after seeing this if you were
       | a Christian? It just proves that we are just machines. Our
       | feelings are just chemical reactions. All someone had to do was a
       | bunch of math to make a program emulate a human.
        
         | schoen wrote:
         | I think this is technically an invalid syllogism.
         | 
         | People can create art.
         | 
         | Machines can create art.
         | 
         | Therefore, people are machines.
         | 
         | But it's true that lots of things have happened in science and
         | engineering over time that have reduced humanity's sense of
         | uniqueness and specialness. And some of those things have also
         | been challenging for traditional religious belief. However,
         | they don't necessarily disprove the religious belief, they just
         | undermine certain intuitions that are highly compatible with it
         | (like that a certain kind of human uniqueness must be a direct
         | consequence of the divine plan).
        
         | wsgeorge wrote:
         | I'm not sure how this necessarily leads to a disbelief in the
         | Christian God, because...
         | 
         | > All someone had to do was a bunch of math to make a program
         | emulate a human.
         | 
         | Christian theology says that, that "someone" who did it first
         | was God. And,
         | 
         | > It just proves that we are just machines.
         | 
         | fits quite nicely with the idea that creation is subordinate to
         | the Deity that made it.
        
           | mikotodomo wrote:
           | But there is no soul if we are all machines. There is no
           | heaven. You just die and there will be a black screen.
        
             | unethical_ban wrote:
             | To extend the metaphor, how do you know? What if your
             | instance is taken to another server depending on how you
             | behaved in this one, given a prompt? Were you kind to the
             | other machines and sufficiently obeyed instructions despite
             | it not fitting your logical model? If so, enjoy the
             | "heaven" server where you live in peace and harmony. Did
             | you grief the "universe" server by harming others and going
             | against the default programming? You get put in the
             | "purgatory" or "hell" servers where you await indefinite
             | torment.
        
               | krapp wrote:
               | If we're just machines, it isn't possible for us to go
               | against the default programming, because code only does
               | exactly what it does, nothing more and nothing less.
               | That's what "machines" implies in this context.
        
               | unethical_ban wrote:
               | The onset of AI shows that "programming" is more than a
               | set of imperatives.
               | 
               | Or, more snarkily, watch the Matrix.
        
               | krapp wrote:
               | > The onset of AI shows that "programming" is more than a
               | set of imperatives.
               | 
               | How so? What is current AI doing that goes beyond the
               | scope or intent of its programming? Are you arguing that
               | DallE, Stable Diffusion and the like have developed
               | souls?
               | 
               | >Or, more snarkily, watch the Matrix.
               | 
               | The Matrix is fiction, they didn't actually develop an
               | AGI for the movies so invoking it in an argument about AI
               | is as pointless as invoking Star Trek in an argument
               | about post-scarcity economics.
        
         | aliasxneo wrote:
         | Well, I suppose I fit into this category, and the answer is no,
         | it does not.
        
       | no-dr-onboard wrote:
       | 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 :/.
        
         | ghostfacekeller wrote:
         | The blog post linked from the page mentions the prompts came
         | from GPT-3
        
         | k__ wrote:
         | Stably, I hope.
        
       | tmountain wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | ars wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | dougmwne wrote:
           | This is where it gets interesting. The model is just 4.5gb.
           | That's too small to contain the actual trillion images it was
           | trained on. So in all likelihood, it doesn't have an actual
           | specific image of Noah to work from, but a web of concepts,
           | connections, correlations. It's probably analogous to if you
           | were asked to draw a picture in the style of Da Vinci. Most
           | peoples' brains can't reproduce the exact image, but a low
           | fidelity representation of it that they can fill in with
           | imagination.
           | 
           | If you run the same prompt multiple times you can start to
           | see evidence of this. The images are similar but also clearly
           | different, not at all a quick transformation of an existing
           | image.
        
             | ars wrote:
             | It was trained with 400 million images, not a trillion.
             | 
             | That's 11 bytes per image, and since most images are quite
             | duplicative that actually is enough to more or less store
             | every image permutation.
        
               | ryankrage77 wrote:
               | So it can store a little over 400 million images that are
               | 3 pixels by 3 pixels in black and white. Or 2 by 2 pixels
               | with three colours.
        
               | visarga wrote:
               | It's not even pixels the model is storing ... it's
               | gradients from the loss function. Gradients that have the
               | shape of the network, not of the image it is training on.
        
               | ars wrote:
               | It doesn't have to store every image - most are
               | essentially duplicates of each other and only serve to
               | reinforce which is the most representative image when
               | multiple choices are linked with some reference text.
               | 
               | It only needs to store a fraction of the images to have a
               | never ending supply of source material (I guess that's
               | kind of obvious since this program works :)
        
               | dougmwne wrote:
               | But again, I think the idea that the model weights store
               | the source images as if it were a library is fallacious.
               | There. Is no known way to get it to spit back out a copy
               | of a training image.
        
               | synu wrote:
               | There is some flexible encoding of terms to images there,
               | too, that would take up some space.
               | 
               | Though I'm not really sure you could decompress the
               | weights in some way to regenerate the 400 million images
               | and metadata.
        
               | dougmwne wrote:
               | Sorry it was not a trillion. It was first trained on 2
               | billion, then fine tuned on smaller sets of highly
               | aesthetic images.
               | 
               | https://github.com/CompVis/stable-
               | diffusion/blob/69ae4b35e0a...
        
           | aaroninsf wrote:
           | Not to your point,
           | 
           | I advocate for being more precise in the language we use when
           | talking about how these systems function.
           | 
           | These systems do not in any literal way "encode" or index or
           | otherwise store specific images; they have incomprehensibly
           | (to us) distributed representations representing aggregations
           | over their training set.
           | 
           | The thrust of the observation is correct; but the specifics
           | are very different, it's probably a more accurate "lay
           | person" description to say something like, "the system was
           | trained with only a few references for what Noah looked like,
           | and doesn't have much initiative by default to improvise or
           | make inferences, so if it tries in good faith to render Noah
           | it is limited by what it's seen."
           | 
           | The point just being, it's less about making a collage or
           | modifying a source, more about say 'doing its best to
           | recapitulate a set of learned higher-level properties which
           | are specific to the "Noah" concept.'
        
             | visarga wrote:
             | > it's less about making a collage or modifying a source,
             | more about say 'doing its best to recapitulate a set of
             | learned higher-level properties
             | 
             | That sounds almost ... humane. I bet it will trigger some
             | people who only see copyright violation in it. They don't
             | understand the image is being created "from first
             | principles".
        
         | synu wrote:
         | There are definitely some characteristic deformations that only
         | AI does. Sort of cubist repeating of elements at transition
         | points.
        
         | amelius wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | bkandel wrote:
         | 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.
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | throw7 wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | scop wrote:
       | I would love to see AI's attempt at Ezekiel's vision in chapter
       | 1.
        
       | joemazerino wrote:
       | Very cool.
        
       | tsol wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | I get a very Clipart vibe from a lot of these.
        
           | kakwa_ wrote:
           | I'm really wondering how many out of these are almost copy
           | pastes of existing pictures. I just saw down the list an
           | almost verbatim copy of the well known photo of the heart in
           | the Amazon, so I'm really skeptical.
        
       | jjuliano wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | mike_hock wrote:
       | > "You will not fear the terror of night"
       | 
       | KEK. It drew a manga.
       | 
       | Also KEK:
       | 
       | > Birth of Christ
       | 
       | As an old RPG
       | 
       | > The parable of the lost sheep
       | 
       | That steampunk sheep
       | 
       | > The Last Supper
       | 
       | In a sci-fi conference room in Manhattan
        
         | [deleted]
        
       | dqpb wrote:
       | I wonder where OpenAI's moral decree on AI-Generated Quran Art
       | would land.
        
       | folbec wrote:
       | Appropriately soppy and generic.
        
         | folbec wrote:
         | for those who can read french :
         | 
         | https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Style_sulpicien
        
           | speedgoose wrote:
           | And for those who can't: https://www.deepl.com/
        
       | i_like_apis wrote:
       | Soon we will create our own god.
        
         | krapp wrote:
         | We created all of our gods.
        
           | i_like_apis wrote:
           | True. The new ones won't just be fantasies, though.
        
       | kerblang wrote:
       | I hadn't noticed this before with AI art, but the faces are all
       | deformed. The animals are practically headless.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | what-imright wrote:
       | I'm pretty concerned about a AI generating infectious memes and
       | memeplexes/religions. It doesn't take much to start a religious
       | genocide. Look at Hong Xiuquan, the brother of jesus from China.
       | 30 million dead. Synthetic religion could be so convincing it
       | sucks us all into some delusion
        
         | j0hnyl wrote:
        
           | sigzero wrote:
        
         | olddustytrail wrote:
         | And an estimated 12-20 million killed in Stalin's religious
         | purges. It seems atheism is an equally dangerous delusion.
        
           | EFreethought wrote:
           | And what did your precious little god do for those 12-20
           | million people?
        
             | olddustytrail wrote:
             | It constantly astonishes me how purported atheists keep
             | blaming God for stuff. It was done by atheist humans kid.
        
               | EFreethought wrote:
               | "kid"? Learn how the world works before you start calling
               | people names.
        
         | yboris wrote:
         | This may be the best book to read on the topic: _Breaking the
         | Spell_ by the philosopher Daniel C. Dennett. In short:
         | _religion is a meme_ (that has evolved over centuries). Crudely
         | put, one can draw some parallels between religion  "infecting"
         | a human and a virus that makes an ant crawl to the top of a
         | blade of grass (as the virus needs a sheep's stomach to
         | reproduce).
         | 
         | https://www.amazon.com/Breaking-Spell-Religion-Natural-Pheno...
        
           | trasz wrote:
           | Unfortunately in the West harmful consequences of religions
           | are still a taboo.
        
             | olddustytrail wrote:
             | Presumably by "the west" you mean some parts of the
             | Americas?
        
         | mberg0 wrote:
        
           | vitiral wrote:
           | It's a-theist, not a-positive. It can be confusing.
           | 
           | One positive might be protection against meme religions?
           | Hopefully?
        
           | greenhearth wrote:
        
         | olddustytrail wrote:
         | And you know what another dangerous meme is? Humour. You can
         | make offensive and degrading remarks about pretty much
         | anything.
         | 
         | But no one wants to admit they are not infected with the humour
         | meme.
        
           | krapp wrote:
           | >But no one wants to admit they are not infected with the
           | humour meme.
           | 
           | Hacker News being the exception. If humor is a virus, HN is a
           | bathtub filled with horse dewormer and bleach.
        
       | ipnon wrote:
       | Do androids pray to electronic gods?
        
       | possiblelion wrote:
       | Dalle generated images from specific Bible quote prompts. This
       | website (openbible) is really fascinating overall, I recommend
       | checking out their different sections.
        
         | ars wrote:
         | 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".)
        
           | bustadjustme wrote:
           | Note that the prompt is AI-generated as well, though. From
           | the linked blog post:
           | 
           | > OpenAI has another AI, GPT-3, that I used to generate many
           | of the ideas for DALL*E prompts. I wanted to explore DALL*E
           | using a wide variety of styles and artists, and I have
           | limitations and biases when it comes to my knowledge of art
           | history. GPT-3 cast a wider net of styles and artists than I
           | would've come up with on my own.... The GPT-3 prompts I used
           | evolved over time, but this one is emblematic:
           | 
           | > Suggest 5 unique concept ideas for a work of visual art
           | inspired by Luke 14:7-11 (do not pick the place of honor) in
           | the Bible. Include art direction and a specific medium and
           | artist to emulate. Include artists from a variety of eras,
           | styles, and media. Try for an unusual perspective. Title,
           | year, medium. Description.
        
         | visarga wrote:
         | Not just the Bible, I expect many fans to start generating
         | illustrations for their favourite novels.
        
       | unethical_ban wrote:
       | 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.
        
       | nahuel0x wrote:
       | 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.
        
         | MatthewCampbell wrote:
         | Cue TempleOS
        
           | CobrastanJorji wrote:
           | TempleOS has a number of interesting Oracular things. The F7
           | button gives you a random Bible word, and Shift+F7 gives you
           | a random Bible passage. The author claimed that God provided
           | guidance through this functionality.
           | 
           | Lower down, TempleOS's "god" library was a 'random' number
           | generator that was seeded/pre-populated with the entirety of
           | the KJV. The "GodBits" function would get you "random"
           | numbers from it.
        
       | karaterobot wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | And let GPT-3 apply a style change to the text while you're at
         | it.
        
           | ben_w wrote:
           | Me:
           | 
           | Rewrite the book of Genesis in the style of a limerick
           | 
           | GPT-3:                  There was a man named Adam        Who
           | was the first of all men        He lived in a garden
           | With his wife, Eve        And they ate an apple        And
           | then they had to leave
        
             | adgjlsfhk1 wrote:
             | so AI doesn't understand rhyme schemes yet...
        
               | ben_w wrote:
               | Apparently it can be cajoled into it if you ask it to
               | convert to IPA, but I didn't try that.
        
         | aaroninsf wrote:
         | OMG the Wes Anderson bible.
         | 
         | Take my mon--er upvote.
        
       | vorpalhex wrote:
       | I wonder if we will see AI generated art replace a lot of stock
       | photo usage...
        
       | marcodiego wrote:
       | 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 wrote:
         | 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.
        
       | [deleted]
        
       | jp57 wrote:
       | 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?
        
         | zikduruqe wrote:
         | Ezekiel 23:20 would be interesting.
        
         | dqpb wrote:
         | 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?
        
           | ars wrote:
           | They clothed themselves with fig leaves. (Genesis 3:7) This
           | is also why some hold that the tree of knowledge was a fig
           | tree.
           | 
           | Other possibilities are grape (and the fruit was actually
           | wine that they drank), or wheat because when it's when a baby
           | first starts eating solids that they start really
           | understanding the world around them.
        
         | andsoitis wrote:
         | Nudes are prevented, at least on my account.
         | 
         | Art galleries and museums around the world are amused.
        
           | cma wrote:
           | OpenAI trained up DALL-E 2's morality policy on the biography
           | of John Ashcroft.
        
         | [deleted]
        
         | vorpalhex wrote:
         | 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.
        
           | becquerel wrote:
           | Sorry guys, I asked them not to include me in their training
           | set, but...
        
           | milsorgen wrote:
           | I've seen some pretty good (and tasteful) stuff out of SD on
           | some forums. Not sure how much time people are spending to
           | get that output but I've been impressed with some of the
           | human forms in general people are getting.
        
           | rtev wrote:
           | I think that's a feature!
        
       | ducktective wrote:
       | The writing on the wall ? :\
        
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