What Is The Gods of AI?
A 400-page AI-generated spiritual journey.
My new book The Gods of AI is out now.
What is The Gods of AI?
The Gods of AI is a 400-page art book that uses an AI-image generator to visualize Gods and spiritual concepts.
To create this book, I put phrases like “God of Language” or “faith” into an AI-image generator, produced over 20,000 images in two months, and edited the results into a cohesive book that explores our collective unconscious.
What do you mean by “our collective unconscious?”
I say our collective unconscious because the AI draws from every visual image created by humans in its dataset. That data is greater than any one human consciousness. It includes the collective consciousness of every person or artist who created those images.
When I enter “Goddess of Love” into the AI, it draws from every image it learned from in its dataset that pertains to our concept of love and the divine and synthesizes them into a new image. Like so:
If one artist drew these images, they would come only from the consciousness of that artist. Instead, images come from the collective unconscious of ALL recorded artists.
In this way, AI can be used as a divination tool. What does humanity collectively think about an idea as shown in their art? Let’s ask the AI.
Each section includes a tarot-style description interpreting the images reveals about our collective unconscious. If you dwell on these images, they have insights into how we perceive spiritual concepts.
Can you give an example?
I created images based on both the prompts “Heaven” and “Hell.” Images of hell had lots of people. Heaven was empty clouds. What does this reveal about our ideas about both concepts? There is a saying that “hell is other people.” Perhaps the reason we haven’t been able to create “heaven on Earth” is that we can’t image it with others.
Stronger images come from using the prompt “God of [concept]” rather than just the concept by itself. If you prompt “science,” you’ll get stock images in labs. If you prompt “God of Science,” you’ll get electric energy exploding into a mushroom cloud out of the head of an archetypal labcoat-wearing Einstein genius. That is a closer representation of the power of science in our world than just someone holding a beaker.
How did you create these images?
Every image used only the concept as the prompt. If a section is titled “faith, then the only text I gave the AI was the word “faith.” This is rare in AI-image generation. Most creators use a series of words to tell the AI exactly what subject, artistic style, medium, etc. to create. Instead, I let the AI determine what “faith” looked like.
That said, I still made artistic choices. Every image was repeatedly upscaled, remastered, and had variations created of it. According to Midjourney AI, the image generator I used for this project, I created over 20,000 images during the period I was working on this book. There were between 50 and 500 per prompt. Each section only has 3-5 pages of images in the final book. This art is as much mine as anything I’ve created.
Buy the Gods of AI here.
Buy on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0BMTFSNQ5
Originally published here.