John the Baptist as a Mandaean Priest according to AI

I wasn’t sure whether this should be in this post or my recent post about artificial intelligence and the book AI 2041, one of my posts about my trip to the Holy Land focused on John the Baptist, or separate. In the end I made it separate. I worked with two different kinds of AI platforms – one that produces text based on a prompt, the other two ones that produce images based on a text prompt – to see what they would come up with. I gave all of them the same text prompt. I began with OpenAI and gave it the prompt “John the Baptist as a Mandaean priest” to see what it would come up with. This was the result:

Most scholars, however, identify John the Baptist as an Essene priest and not a Mandaean priest, who were a relatively late sect that came into existence after the destruction of the Temple of Jerusalem, during the Jewish revolt.

The Mandaeans are a Gnostic sect, and as such are not in communion with other Christian sects, including the Roman Catholic Church. The Mandaean sect is monotheistic, but not Trinitarian, and rejected the New Testament and the Old Testament.

See also

* Gnosticism
* Mandaeism

Category:Essenes
Category:Gnosticism
Category:Mandaeism
Category:John the Baptist

Thoughts?

Next for images. I am less impressed with what Dall-E came up with. That is an AI tool that turns a text prompt into an image. I gave it the same input. What do you think of these?

Have you used an AI art generator and had a result that impressed you? If so, please let me know. Gizmodo has a review of some of the best free AI art generators available and it introduced me to Midjourney, a bot on Discord that generates artwork in response to text prompts. Here is what it came up with, which I consider somewhat better. Do you agree?

Of related interest, a podcast called Ungraduated Living has discovered the Mandaeans:

Also, did you see my guest post on Bart Ehrman’s blog about John the Baptist infancy traditions and how they may have been taken over by Christians and applied to Jesus instead? If not, check it out and let me know what you think!

There continues to be plenty of interesting AI news and new books on the subject.

Gary Marcus: Building Artificial Intelligence We Can Trust

There was also an article about a robot Tesla is working on