The purpose of this presentation is to demonstrate the storytelling of the Ascension of Jesus Christ into Heaven via imagery. Catholicism has centuries of paintings and sculptures of the Ascension and they all convey the same story in different ways.
AI has thousands of artworks at its disposal and this presentation will be a series of generated images in order to see how an AI can convey the emotion of the Ascension.
Will it be anything like the millions of depictions humans have made?
For the first prompt I was very vague and gave no instruction on how I wanted it to look. When it asked me for clarification, I told it to surprise me. The image it gave me looked just like the painting "Ascension" (1651) by Francisco Camilo. The colors and "paint strokes" are very similar, which shows where the AI got the inspiration for this image.
This time the image generated was almost identical to the last. It does not appear any different from the painting sort of imagery it gave me previously, which tells me this AI struggles to create realism beyond what looks like a realistic painting.
The image it gave me this time was in a bright, happy and colorful artstyle; appropriate for a children's book. The expressions of the people in this image are flat and emotionless. They have black dots for eyes that are not quite looking at anything in particulatr. The image conveys the story well enough for a kids book, but the emotion of the miraculous event taking place is lacking.
This time Chat gave me an image of the Ascension as if it was carved into marble. I expected the sculpture to be more of a 3D figure that you might find in a Catholic church but what it made was art carved into a wall. It is quite beautiful and clearly inspired by real life.
Along with these images, I wanted AI to create some Catholic, Gregorian chant about the Ascension. I put in my prompt explaining that I wanted acapella, Latin chant sung by Dominican Brothers. I got two songs in exchange for my prompt.
"O Ascendite" was very calm, slow, and sounded like chant. Not as moody or as serious as I expected, but still very good, and it was what I asked for.
"Ascend, Ascend" was a solo, chant-esque, English song about the Ascension before it swelled into a ballad. It was not what I asked for but was enjoyable nonetheless.
The concept for this project was to show how AI can convey emotion and storytelling through a well documented event such as the Ascension, and to share the beauty of Catholic art and music. My workflow with AI was quite smooth throughout this project. I wrote all my responses to each piece of media that was generated by ChatGPT and Udio. I put in all the information I wanted and preferences I had into the chat and created an HTML file. When ChatGPT couldn't do what I wanted with the code I would do it on my own. When I didn't know how to do something I would have chat do it. There were very few bumps along the way. As I progressed through this project, I was coming up with new things to add. My original idea I had in class looked almost nothing like what I ended up with due to my ideas constantly evolving and changing as I went. I used my group's project of emotion and storytelling with AI to lead me through this project. I took a subject that meant a lot to me and learned what AI could make with it. This process taught me more about working with AI and how useful of a tool it is for projects like this. Especially when you have to work with code as a non-coder. I was able to make my ideas come to life in ways I wouldn't have been able to do on my own and that is quite incredible.
ChatGPT – Used for generating images, text explanations, and HTML code assistance.
Udio – Used for generating the Gregorian chant audio tracks for this project.