How does artificial intelligence deal with the teachings of Jesus Christ? Apparently quite well in some cases.  

Super Bowl ads this year included two about Jesus from the ministry He Gets Us.  There are more thought-provoking videos at their web site HeGetsUs.com. One, linked here, is about AI.  An artificial intelligence image synthesizer  Midjourney was asked by He Gets It to generate images about love from simple text prompts.

The video shows generated images using software from the company Midjourney. When prompted to synthesize an image from the prompt “love”,  the response was pictures containing hearts – the kind you might see on a cheesy valentine day’s card.  

Then the AI was asked to  visualize love the way Jesus talked about it.   

The image generator was prompted “Imagine forgiving a friend who has betrayed you.” The AI generated couples in a relationship of friendship after their confession and forgiveness.

A number of other prompts also gave great images. The last instruction was “imagine a man lays down his life for his friends.” Heartwarming images were generated. One was a heavily attended funeral in a cemetery with flowers and bowed heads in solemn remembrance. Another, also in a graveyard, showed two silhouetted people mourning at the grave of the sacrificed. One touched the gravestone in love.  A third showed a slumped mother on her knees crying.

AI may wonderfully synthesize images portraying love learned from its training data, but AI itself will never experience love. The He Gets It video ends with an appropriate phrase to end its short overview about Jesus and AI.

“Jesus’ love was never artificial.”