Engineer creates 'AI Clone of Jesus' that recites Bible
A New York-based engineer has created an artificial intelligence algorithm that's been programmed with passages of Scripture and named AI Jesus.
Through the use of a natural-language processing system, engineer George Durendal programmed the AI to read the King James Bible "and nothing else," he said.
"I like to describe this A.I. as locking a baby in a room with nothing but a Bible for 15 years. You then open up the room 15 years later and find that it's learned to read, speak, and write using nothing but the Bible," the engineer wrote in an Aug. 25 post on Medium.
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"In these days of trials and tribulations many have turned to religion. But what religion is left for those who have averted their gaze from the fables of old to the shiny metal toys of today? I present to you A.I. Jesus. An artificial intelligence of my invention created from the King James Bible and nothing else."
Durendal explained in an email to The Christian Post on Wednesday that he's not a particularly religious person but did attend a Catholic university, "which has made me a bit more cognizant of the influence of Christianity on Western philosophy."
He wrote some of the code for the project three years ago.
"With those snippets of code included it took me about two weeks from when I first had the idea. The actual A.I. takes a few hours to train and [it] reads the Bible tens of thousands of times," he explained, adding that in light of the Bible's influence on modern ways of thinking, he thought it was only natural that an A.I. system should learn it.
Durendal instructed the artificial intelligence program to write about "the plague," "Caesar," and "The End of Days."
"The A.I. is an Boltzmannian natural-language processing model," named after Ludwig Eduard Boltzmann, an Austrian physicist famous for his contributions in the field of statistical mechanics and statistical thermodynamics.
This particular model "tries to replicate the style of the King James Bible without quite copying it. But that description doesn’t quite have as much cachet as A.I. Jesus," Durendal explained on Medium.
Durendal set up a Twitter account for the AI described as "A.I. Generated Clone of Jesus."
He also provided a link where people can read "the full corpus written by A.I. Jesus (approx. 60,000 words)."
The AI algorithm has been making up its own prophetic utterances, some of which sound foreboding and ominous because of technological glitches.
“O LORD of hosts, the God of Israel; When they saw the angel of the Lord above all the brethren which were in the wilderness and the soldiers of the prophets shall be ashamed of men,” one portion reads.
Another portion declares: “that thou shouldest take him a great multitude of people and the spoil of the wicked shall be the same things that are in the midst of the sea and the sea shall be the father of the devils.”
Durendal added: "Whether or not God created man or man created God might be a topic of eternal debate. But what surely cannot be debated is man’s creation of A.I. Jesus. Perhaps many thousands of years from now people and robots alike will pour over these texts as they do holy books today."
