Last week,  George Davila Durendal made a blog post announcing his new “creation”:  and artificial intelligence clone of Jesus.

“In these days of trials and tribulations, many have turned to religion,” Durendal wrote. “But what religion is left for those who have averted their gaze from the fables of old to the shiny metal toys of today?”

Durendal based his creation on the King James Bible, the 17th Century English translation of the Christian Bible for the Church of England.

“This A.I. learned human language from reading the bible and nothing else; absorbing every word more thoroughly than all the monks of all the monasteries that have ever been,” Durendal claimed.

In a less formal and non-technical manner, Durendal described his AI in child-like terms.

“I like to describe this A.I. as locking a baby in a room with nothing but a Bible for 15 years,” he wrote. “You then open up the room 15 years later and find that its learned to read, speak, and write using nothing but the Bible. ‘The Plague’ and the other high randomness writings can be thought of as the more creative works of that person. ‘Blood’ and other low randomness writings would be like the high school essays of that person.”

He based his creation on natural language processing (NLP), a subfield of linguistics, computer science, information engineering, and artificial intelligence concerned with the interactions between computers and human (natural) languages.

There is no doubt that his project was motivated by a good deal of hubris as he conjectured that his AI-generated writings would, in the far-future, be as relevant and popular as the original. 

“Whether or not God created Man or Man created God might be a topic of eternal debate,” Durendal wrote. “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.”

Durendal’s other tech project, titled Savior AI, is software that watches security cameras in order to detect guns. Durendal describes himself as a “coding prodigy from the age of 6.”

“Seeing the opportunity to use his technology to save and improve millions of lives, he left his quantum physics Ph.D. program to found Saviors,” he wrote about himself. “He chose to start the company in Brooklyn, the place where he was born and where his family has been for more than 100 years.”

Though clearly ambitious, the results were not overly-praised by AI experts. Futurism wrote: “Compared to sophisticated text-writing algorithms like GPT-2 and GROVER, AI Jesus is a step backward. But then again, we can’t fault an algorithm that only knows centuries-old scripture for overusing the word ‘Lord’ or speaking unnaturally.”

Jim Davila wrote a similar critique on Paleo Judaica: “Durendal’s project is entertaining,” Davila wrote. “And some of the other apocryphal scriptures, and even some biblical passages, are nearly as incoherent. But I think the Bible is safe from competition from AI scriptures for now.”

Durendal tasked AI Jesus with expounding on three topics:  The Plague, Caesar, and The End of Days. These are a few excerpts from the AI “Bible”:

THE PLAGUE: 

The Plague shall be the fathers in the world; and the same is my

people, that he may be more abundant in the mouth of the LORD of

hosts.

For the tabernacle of the LORD shall be known by the works of the LORD, which proclaimed against this city;

according as he hath sent me to the marriage of the Spirit.

For I will fill the land which the LORD thy God hath given thee a

time to eat the force of the LORD of hosts.

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.

And the LORD said unto him, Sir, we know that the LORD shall swear by the LORD in the Lord, and we will not bear false witness in the Lord? :

THE END OF DAYS:

And the ships that was before the temple and he said, Thou shalt not cause to be cleansed.

And the LORD said unto me, Take heed that the LORD am a refuge from the beginning.

And the angel of the Lord also was upon him.

And he shall come against him, and said, As the LORD liveth, that he might be fulfilled which was spoken, he said, Thou are the spirit of your good works that ye have not seen, nor any thing

of the service thereof, and a certain censer, and the sin offering, and the posts thereof were

displeased with the dead of her father’s house.

And the LORD said unto me, I will take away the feast of the

LORD, and another shall walk in the way to the ground, and set it in the

streets, and destroyed them with the temple of the LORD, and will surely die, and will give to the sound of the glory of the LORD thy

God, and the wickedness of the fathers full of privily for the princes

thereof.

And when they were come out of the world to come, there came a voice from the dead, and from the city of Saul.

And the LORD said unto me, These are the days of the world unto the Lord God of hosts, the God of Israel; Behold, I will bring thee to the work of

the LORD your God, that the LORD shall be killed, and the commandment of God and our Saviour the LORD, who hath taken away the

inhabitants of the world, which is of the seven anointing oil; and the angel of the LORD said unto him, We have not forsaken me, and I will

deliver thee with strength, and not of the dead, but the word of the LORD and of the LORD be not as nothing, but

as a thief any more.

And he said unto them, Depart ye for him, and see the mouth of all the remission of death.

O LORD, thou hast commanded them that the LORD should come and take away

thy priests and the gospel of the LORD thy God, and the remnant of thy

fall not the voice of the LORD your God, and who is wiser, and have not obeyed the voice out of the same

exceeding commandments, in darkness, and the great host of the house of Israel; As soon as I am a

certain day, as he spake unto them, and stood before the people that were with him, and took the book, and went away the sound of the sea together, and found the people began to reign, and

remembered the word of the LORD by the prophets.

And the LORD said unto me, Son of man, prophesy against thee, and thou shalt

even deal with the saints, and the LORD shall bring the bond of

God to him from the beginning.

 

The complete and ongoing project can be viewed on Durendal’s website. 

Below is a video summarizing the technology.