AI Jesus writes Bible-inspired verse

AI Jesus writes Bible-inspired verse
Credit: Franck V. on Unsplash

AI has found religion.

Or at least one engineer and quantum researcher has brought a bit of religion to his AI project.

George Davila Durendal fed the entire text of the King James Bible into his algorithms designed to churn out dialogue in the style of the Old Testament.

Durendal claimed his project, AI Jesus, learned and absorbed "every word more thoroughly than all the monks of all the monasteries that have ever been," offering a little biblical style verse of his own.

AI Jesus produced passages, totaling more than 30,000 words, that may almost pass for the real thing—but not quite.

Durendal programmed AI Jesus to write passages on three topics: "The Plague," "Caesar" and "The End of Days." Some might suggest he had current global events on his mind.

While the King James Bible has such flowing verses as "Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour" (Peter 5:8 ) and "Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you" (Matthew 7:7), AI Jesus was somewhat less comprehendible.

"For I will fill the land which the Lord thy God hath given thee a time to eat the force of the Lord of hosts," AI Jesus suggested. "Power and godly, and have commanded the children of the world, and will set my face against thee, and thou shalt be called the people," it said.

With more than 2,500 versions of the Bible to choose from, Durendal selected the King James version to train AI Jesus in vocabulary, grammar, and syntax. King James is the most popular English translation and most widely read of all Bible versions.

AI Jesus "tries to replicate the style of the King James Bible without quite copying it," Durendal said.

He acknowledged that AI Jesus was a bit abstract at points and contained a number of grammatical errors.

To remedy those initial problems, Durendal tweaked his code and presented AI Jesus with three new topics to expound upon: "Blood," "Greeks," and "Wisdom."

By tightening some parameters of his program, it generated text that contained fewer errors. But it also lacked "the artistic flair and prophet prose" of the first renderings.

Durendal explained: "This orderliness/randomness trade-off is one characteristic of AI 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."

Jennifer Xue, a blogger at ProWritingAid, which focuses on AI and literature, wrote two years ago that AI is poised to disrupt the publishing world.

"In theory, Big Data and data-driven analysis should be able to create the 'perfect' piece of literature, which is both superior in literary quality and best-selling," she said. "Authors needn't fret just yet, however. Scientists predict that they will need another two decades of development, as the current algorithms lack 'intuition'."

She continued, "All those AI technologies, which include natural learning and machine learning, are based on human language characteristics that are broken down by quantifying readability, phonology, writing density, and others. These components can only be developed by real human beings with intuition, feelings, and emotions."

AI Jesus reminds us that human history is on the verge of being written by non-humans.

To his credit, Durendal was able to poke gentle fun at the less than stellar results of his AI writing project.

"At the very least its an interesting way to either awe or horrify your relatives this holiday season," he said.

As the Bible says, "A joyful heart is good medicine."

More information: medium.com/@GDurendal/i-create … of-jesus-4263339c327

github.com/GeorgeDavila/AI_Jesus

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