The developer of A.I. Jesus is brazen about his intentions:

In these days of trials and tribulations many have turned to religion. But what religion is left for those who have averted their gaze from the fables of old to the shiny metal toys of today?

I present to you A.I. Jesus. An artificial intelligence of my invention created from the King James Bible and nothing else. This A.I. learned human language from reading the bible and nothing else; absorbing every word more thoroughly than all the monks of all the monasteries that have ever been.

George Davila Durendal, “I Created an A.I. Clone of Jesus” at Medium

Durendal (pictured) is an AI engineer and Founder & CEO at a computer security firm, Saviors.ai (a possible source for the basic idea behind A.I. Jesus?). A childhood coding prodigy, he reports that he sold another startup, DeepTulipAI (tools for small hedge funds) earlier this year for $1 million. He is also a “successful bitcoin investor.” And nothing if not ambitious:

Whether or not God created Man or Man created God might be a topic of eternal debate. But what surely cannot be debated is Man’s creation of A.I. Jesus. Perhaps many thousands of years from now people and robots alike will pour over these texts as they do holy books today.

At the very least its an interesting way to either awe or horrify your relatives this holiday.

George Davila Durendal, “I Created an A.I. Clone of Jesus” at Medium

It could also cause said relatives to question the perpetrator’s good taste and judgment. Here is some output of the Boltzmannian natural-language processing model, which imitates the King James Bible without copying it, on the topics of “The Plague,” “Caesar,” and “The End of Days”:

➤The Plague shall be the fathers in the world; and the same is my people, that he may be more abundant in the mouth of the LORD of hosts.

➤ And he shall come against him, and said, As the LORD liveth, that he might be fulfilled which was spoken, he said, Thou are the spirit of your good works that ye have not seen, nor any thing of the service thereof, and a certain censer, and the sin offering, and the posts thereof were displeased with the dead of her father’s house.

➤ If ye will not believe not, but the Father and the Lord Jesus Christ, who hath no doing some desolate, as the sand of the needy, and his disciples saw him, and went and told him all the words of the LORD, which God destroyed them, and let them go.

Durendal tells us that newer versions of the program, “Blood,” “Greeks,” and “Wisdom,” are somewhat of an improvement:

These new writings are less random and less prone to errors. But they lack they the artistic flair and prophetic prose of the writing presented above. This orderliness/randomness trade-off is one characteristic of A.I. language models. You can have a more interesting model that takes artistic liberties and produces some glitches. Or you can have more mundane, more technically proficient writing. But not both.

George Davila Durendal, “I Created an A.I. Clone of Jesus” at Medium

He offers 60,000 words from A.I. Jesus to date.

The King James Bible was named after the British monarch who authorized it in 1604 (hence it is sometimes referred to as the Authorized Version). Forty-seven scholars set about the formidable task of translation from the original Hebrew and Greek.

Published in 1611, it came to be recognized as “the most faithful and scholarly translation to date—not to mention the most accessible.“

The advent of printing meant that many people could acquire a Bible and read it for themselves. As a result, the KJV played a significant role in standardizing early modern English. Many current expressions originated there; for example, “bite the dust,” “by the skin of your teeth,” and “the blind leading the blind.”

Generally, when the King James Bible sounds obscure, the problems stem from translators’ uncertainty about the original Hebrew or Greek or from the way English has changed in the last four centuries. Also, we may not always understand the context in which the words were written. Consider, for example, “make straight in the desert a highway for our God.” A highway? For God? It probably refers to the fact that citizens were expected to fix up the main roads when the king came through their district. Metaphorically, therefore, it means “an inspection is coming; straighten the place up.”

It is never obscure simply because the source of the text is a nonsense combination of words. One suspects, therefore, that millennia from now, “people and robots” will not be poring over these “texts.”

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