Cinema

Some AI generated, Church-related movies I created with Google’s new Vemo 2.

David W. Patten’s fun, 2nd-hand, late account of being visited by Cain

Joseph Smith writing D&C 121 in Liberty Jail

Moroni burying the plates

While AI has been able to do very short movie clips for some time now, I’ve waited for a while to do this post until it was somewhat passable. I think we’re kind of there now, but there’s still a lot of work to do. The clips are still quite short, and progress is still being made in fine-grained control over camera angles and the such, but we all know where this is going, and eventually filmmaking that previously took millions of dollars and elite-level contacts will be doable by any creative in their basement, so the homegrown Stephen Spielbergs of Mormonism won’t have to be born in the right place and right time with the right contacts to make his or her masterpiece.

Of course we aren’t there yet, or even close to there. I couldn’t quite get the gold plates to render correctly, for example, and Google’s famously censorious AI put more clothes on Cain than the account described, but for something I made in ten minutes the potential down the road should be obvious.

Changing Minds

A research team out of Zurich had AI bots infiltrate the r/changemyviews subreddit and try to, well, change people’s minds, finding that AI bots were three to six times more effective than humans at changing minds, revealing another potential AI use, that of Devil’s Advocate (or to develop your own argument).  To test out this use case I had Chat-GPT 4o argue both sides on the question of whether an LDS person should vote for a pro-choice candidate. You can see the back-and-forth here. It brought up quotes I wasn’t aware of (and yes, I checked it for hallucinations), and generally brought to bear the best arguments you hear from the different sides in these discussions (obviously I am in a position to know, having had some experience with these back-and-forths).

Deep Research

Another big splash in AI land lately was the use of AI to create in-depth advanced reports on a topic. I had it run a summary of the literature on gay LDS mental health, for example, which has a lot of online noise but also a lot of nuance once you get into actual studies, and it did okay but not perfect (although it caught my papers, so it passed that bar I guess).

I had Google’s latest model (Deep Research with 2.5 Pro, currently on the month-long free trial plan) produce a report on the origin and development of the LDS doctrine of apotheosis, and it took about 15 minutes to create a 10,000 word essay on the subject on the subject which, while occasionally wandering a bit, exhibited nuance and and analytical rigor and (I believe) accurately tied the different strands of scripture, history, and theology together.