Ezekiel’s Visions, AI’s Revisions

By A.G. ELROD|MARCH 11, 2024 (https://www.christianitytoday.com/ct/2024/march-web-only/ezekiels-visions-ais-revisions-chatgpt-biblical-interpretat.html

Is it possible to utilize AI to generate contextualized Bible text illustrations for vernacular translations? The author of this interesting, illustrated article gave it a try and reports his results, with sample visualized texts from Ezekiel.

His aim:

"In this article, I’ll share insights from my current research on these AI models’ theological biases and social implications by exploring how they interpret biblical apocalyptic literature from the Book of Ezekiel. Prompting OpenAI’s ChatGPT to generate imagery inspired by these passages lets us critically examine how this model “reads” and represents Scripture.

Images are powerful because they can bypass our reasoning intellect and impact our emotions directly. As its use spreads, AI could influence our perception of biblical stories and, by extension, our faith and church life. Scrutinizing these AI-generated images, we will uncover subtle biases and limitations, and that should prompt us to consider their potential effect on our Christian communities."

"My interaction with the chatbot was designed to maximize its interpretive capabilities. As with humans, asking an AI model to do more interpretation can help force it to reveal its biases—to show its hand. My approach invited three levels of interpretation:

1. Understanding the task: I give a prompt like, Generate images that depict the imagery found in this biblical Hebrew text, accompanied by the passage in its original language.
2. Language translation: The model translates the biblical language into English to instruct the image generation model.
3. Image generation: The final interpretation occurs in the generation of the images themselves"

A portion of the conclusion:

"In the images I’ve shared here, ChatGPT reveals a tendency to favor the familiar and visually exciting over faithfulness to the text. It’s as if the model sifts through a global mosaic of art and architecture, choosing the grand and the dramatic over the scripturally precise. And AI images of Scripture may incorporate many subtler assumptions and suggestions—influenced by secular humanism, progressive social ideologies, different religions, and other unknown inputs—less noticeable than the failings I’ve documented here.

Because of how they’re trained, these generative models will always tend to follow prevailing cultural trends. They will bend with the spirit of the age rather than stand against it. That makes them consistently risky as a source of biblical interpretation, in words as well as images like these, for Christians are called not to “conform to the pattern of this world, but [to] be transformed by the renewing of” our minds (Rom. 12:2)."