The image went viral overnight on social media: it's a stunningly realistic recreation of the face of Jesus Christ, purportedly based on the Shroud of Turin, and was created using cutting-edge artificial intelligence technology.
The image was generated by British tabloid newspaper Daily Express using popular generative AI tool Midjourney as part of a story about new evidence that the Shroud of Turin, which many Catholics believe to be Jesus' burial cloth, dates back 2,000 years to the time of Christ.
Perhaps most striking is the resemblance of the new image, purportedly drawn from the Shroud, to classic depictions of Jesus in Christian art.
“It is amazing that Jesus' true face has been so well preserved over the centuries. This is a testament to the Church's deep faith in his divine humanity,” one X user wrote.
“This is Jesus in victory over death,” declared Michael Voris, a controversial Catholic media personality.
A stunning AI-generated image of Jesus Christ based on the real Shroud of Turin.
This is a great reminder of the fact that God became a specific man at a specific moment in history. It is amazing how well the true identity of Jesus has been conveyed through the centuries. pic.twitter.com/EfVDtGJMBm
— Father Grant Ciccone (@UrbanHermit15) August 22, 2024
But how faithful is the image to the inscription on the Shroud? Not very, according to a Catholic expert on AI interviewed by Angelus.
“I don't think it's scientifically accurate at all,” said Matthew Sanders, founder and CEO of Catholic web-development company Longbeard.
The tool involved, MidJourney, was trained on a vast collection of images from the internet and its own database, so the depiction of Christ is “strikingly similar to other depictions of Jesus, and that's not a coincidence,” said Sanders, who has released several Catholic-themed AI tools.
Still, Saunders said he found the Daily Express photo “compelling” because it “matches many of the stereotypical images of Jesus that we've seen” and because of the way it depicted Christ's wounds and other details of the Shroud.
“I don't mean to downplay it, but I'm not going to put too much emphasis on what we're seeing here,” Sanders said.
Midjourney is the same tool that rose to fame earlier this year when it created a fake image of Pope Francis wearing a Balenciaga-inspired white puffer jacket.
AI researcher Joseph Vukoff agreed that the image's similarity to common depictions of Jesus “isn't particularly surprising, since many of those images are undoubtedly part of the imagery that[MidJourney]was trained on.”
Vukoff, a Catholic philosophy professor at Loyola University Chicago, said he's “not skeptical at all” about the Shroud's authenticity and has high hopes for generative AI tools like MidJourney, but he doesn't think AI is the ideal technology for creating a scientifically accurate rendition of Jesus' face.
“When you add AI to the mix, you also bring training images into the mix,” said Vukoff, author of “Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence” (New City Press, $19.95), due out in 2023.
“This is one of those cases where I think technological advances aren't actually making things better, they're making things worse.”
From left: Matthew Sanders, Joe Vukoff, and Brian Patrick Green.
Brian Patrick Green, who teaches AI ethics at Santa Clara University, stressed that generative AI tools are “designed to be creative, to embellish things,” and that there is reason to be skeptical of such renderings.
Additionally, tools like Midjourney allow users to choose between multiple versions of an image.
“Whoever generated this image likely tried dozens of different iterations on it before deciding that this was the best one,” Green says. “Each time the generative AI generated an image, it made lots of small random tweaks to the image, and finally, when they decided that this was the one that looked good and was ready to be published, this is what you see here.”
But with advances in artificial intelligence coming at a rapid pace, Sanders predicts that efforts may soon begin to “use AI to create a more accurate representation of Jesus based on the Shroud.”
“I wouldn't be surprised if in the coming months we see more modern depictions of him that may not fit into the classic motifs that we've seen,” Sanders said.
But could AI use other clues to help create more realistic portraits of historical figures, such as saints?
While Vukov thinks it's “a great idea in some ways,” he remains skeptical that “AI can give us much insight into historical figures.”
Still, Vukov added, the work “may play a positive role in understanding our perception of historical figures.”
“What this means is that AI can be like a mirror holding up humanity, and in so doing, it can reveal things we didn't notice before. We might discover that, as a group, we have a certain way of thinking about and describing certain historical periods, people or saints.”
As well as animating modern portraits of Catholic saints, Sanders envisions bringing saints to life using text-to-video and lip-syncing technology. For example, users could interact with an avatar of St. Thomas Aquinas and learn about him from a library of content he wrote more than 700 years ago.
“With historical figures, I think we don't have to worry as much and it's good to let people freely experiment and try different techniques to portray saints vividly,” said Sanders, who last year launched Magisterium AI, an artificial intelligence tool trained on a selection of church documents.
Regarding the Shroud of Turin, Green stresses that Catholic teaching does not require belief in traditions such as the authenticity of relics like the Shroud of Turin, and people's faith should not depend on them.
Meanwhile, Mr Green said there was no harm in images such as the Daily Express' depiction of Jesus.
“It's just a computational reconstruction using generative AI, but I think it's interesting,” said Green, who has collaborated on AI research for the Vatican's Congregation for Culture and Education. “It's not something that shakes the faith.”
