AI-generated church art is stunningly beautiful
Most of my writing concerns serious subjects about the Christian faith and American church culture. I’m aware that this website can feel heavy sometimes. Every now and then I try to post something that is a little more light-hearted, contemplative, or nerdy.
A corner of my home office.
For example, last summer I wrote a piece exploring what discovering life beyond Earth could mean for the Christian faith. I find the universe fascinating. The vastness of what lies beyond our planet is a humbling reminder of just how small we are and how much we don’t know. I love this idea so much that hanging next to my desk is a print titled Voyager from 2046 Print Shop.
This is one of those posts that hits all the boxes of being outside the scope of what I normally focus on. It’s super nerdy and I love it.
AI-generated art: the future?
Artificial intelligence (AI) art is a small, but rapidly growing field. If you’ve never heard of this, here’s an oversimplified explanation of how it works: a user enters a query into the program, the AI algorithm runs the description in a library of source images, and applies various artistic expressions to create a random final image.
The Midjourney AI art platform recently opened in beta to everyone , so I took it for a spin. I entered a mix of descriptors for things I find beautiful: church buildings, space bodies such as nebulae, and various color instructions to see what would pop up. The results ranged from underwhelming to breathtaking gorgeous. Here are a few of my favorites I was able to generate after tweaking my queries:
I only spent 10-15 minutes generating these images. Personally, I enjoyed getting to spend a few minutes combining two things I think about a lot: church and the universe. Pretty cool, right?
I explore faith and American church culture from Memphis, TN. Never miss an article by signing up for my free newsletter or becoming a member. You can also subscribe to my podcast.
Images generated by Midjourney. Used under Creative Commons Noncommercial 4.0 Attribution International License.
