Abstract
Through a consideration of examples of the AI Creation Meme, a remix of Michelangelo’s Creazione di Adamo featuring a human hand and a machine hand nearly touching, fingertip to fingertip, this article will tackle the religious continuities and resonances that still emerge in AI discourse in an allegedly ‘secular age’. The AI Creation Meme, as a highly visible cultural artefact appearing in a variety of forms and locations, will be analyzed and discussed for its religious, apocalyptic, and post-humanist narratives, along with reference to earlier work on the New Visibility of Religion—specifically, Alexander Darius Ornella’s consideration of the New Visibility of Religion and religious imagery of the 2006 film, Children of Men. Work that outlines the aspects of critical post-humanism, speculative post-humanism, and transhumanism in relation to the contemporary post-secular age will also be addressed to expand on the implicit apocalyptic messages of the AI Creation Meme. Such a consideration of repeating and remixed imagery will add to the scholarly conversation around AI narratives and the entanglements of religion and technology in our imaginaries of the future.
Highlights
Background ImageryAs in the EU Commission example in Figure 1, some of the memes had background imagery.There were cosmic backgrounds of galaxies and star systems, cityscapes with skyscrapers, walls of binary text, abstract shapes in patterns such as hexagons, keyboards, symbols representing the fields which employ artificial intelligence (AI), and more abstract shapes in the same blue color palette
Three further examples were included, as they were encountered during the collection period and demonstrated relevant themes. These three were the European Commission’s picture already introduced, and an instance of the AI Creation Meme from an episode of the series Star Trek: Picard (2020) (Figure 3), and an image from the website of well-known conspiracist David Icke (DavidIcke.com, this image is in Figure 4), It is by no means suggested that this collection of 79 images represents an exhaustive, or complete, search
We will return to the concept of the post-secular age, but here there is more to be said about the types and varieties of the AI Creation Meme that were obvious from the sample and which remixed The Creation of Adam’s message and content
Summary
On 25th that laid outout thethe elements of of strategic its strategic forEuropean the European of artificial intelligence plan the included the its planplan for the futurefuture of artificial intelligence (AI). The AI Creation Meme will explored in relation to research on the Visibility of Religion andand the the post-secular society. The AI Creation Meme is presented here as mythologizing and enchanted ways of conceptualizing the as an an example examplethat thathighlights highlightscontinuities continuitiesofof mythologizing and enchanted ways of conceptualizing relationship between the human and the non-human other. Enchantments are of characteristic of a world, post-secular world, a concept found in(2008, Habermas’ This approach to these continuities, and the mythologizing of disenchantment itself, is . Josephson-Storm refutes the timeline given by scholars who have drawn on Weber’s concept of disenchantment, such as Gellner (1979); Ritzer (1999); and Partridge (2004) They have argued that after disenchanting modernity, there comes an enchanting post-modernity that can involve pragmatic, capitalistic magic, such as Disneyland (Ritzer 1999). We will discuss the variety and types of the AI Creation Meme, their common themes and aesthetics, and how the AI Creation Meme relates to Michelangelo’s original work and intentions, these being the religious and philosophical resonances around creation and of the relationship between the created and the creator
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