When I think about the story of David and Goliath, I like to picture David as having an extra leg instead of a left arm, ready to throw a whole torso at Goliath, who’s standing behind him amorphously in Sauron-style armor. And thanks to the power of AI, now my imagination has become reality:
Not really. I gave an AI the text prompt: “David fighting Goliath by a river,” and then it created the image by itself. The AI in question is WOMBO Dream, a new app that generates a trading-card style image based on text you give it. While this image was the most horrifying of all the images it generated for me, it did a decent job on many Bible-related prompts. Below is a gallery of my favorites.
The AI did best with prompts relating to the angel announcing the birth of Jesus to the shepherds:
The star in the last image shows up again in this rendition of the adoration of the magi:
Gethsemane captures the essence of the scene, with a somewhat abstract robed figure collapsed while others pray:
The creation of the world shows the waters above and the waters below:
Perennially favorite Bible verse Jeremiah 29:11 gets a literal rendering with a giant eye in the sky:
Here the rainbow in the Noah story becomes an instrument of vengeance:
I call this one “The Kiddie Table at The Last Supper” (are those French fries?):
What it’s really doing here is representing the related scenes multiple times in the same image, which is actually quite common in historical artistic depictions of biblical stories. That’s how I interpret what’s going on in this scene of Elijah being fed by ravens, where I think he appears both in the foreground and in the background:
Finally, here are two images where the AI came up with a conceptually interesting (to me) idea that a human artist could polish and make something thought-provoking. First, here’s a representation of Jesus’ temptation in the wilderness about turning stones to bread. Here there are stones that look like bread to heighten the temptation:
And finally, the Tower of Babel made out of words. That’s just clever:
