A Hollow Experiment: When AI Meets the Divine
Let's be blunt: Rankin's AI-assisted pantheon is not a bold artistic statement. It is not a meaningful exploration of divinity. It is a trick, a visual parlour game wrapped in the illusion of conceptual depth. It is artificial not just in its method but in its very premise: an empty provocation rather than a legitimate reckoning with the sacred. Rankin, ever the provocateur, approaches this work as if the mere act of rendering an AI-generated deity grants it weight. But what do these images actually tell us? Nothing of God, nothing of belief, nothing of humanity's relationship with the divine. What they expose, instead, is the shallowness of AI as a creative force and the limitations of an artist content to let a machine do the seeing for him.
The Gods According to the Machine: Aesthetic Without Substance
These images do not struggle with God; they barely even acknowledge the problem of representation. Where is the ineffability? Where is the terror of the divine? Where is the rupture between mortal and immortal that has haunted artists for millennia? Instead, Rankin's gods are nothing more than algorithmic approximations of existing imagery, derivative regurgitations of past iconography. There is no risk in these portraits, no challenge to the viewer beyond the initial recognition of a familiar aesthetic. They are gods in name only, static, sterile and incapable of embodying the weight of theological thought.
Even the argument that these images are a reflection of AI's understanding of human belief falls apart under scrutiny. AI does not 'understand' anything, it compiles, reconfigures and mimics. It does not wrestle with meaning. And neither, it seems, does Rankin.
Rankin and the Illusion of Inquiry
The most damning flaw of this project is its lack of commitment to its own premise. Rankin himself admits that he has no belief in the divine, no theological investment and no real curiosity beyond the surface level spectacle. "I don't believe in him, her or it," he states. And that is where this all collapses. One cannot interrogate the nature of God without engaging with the question in good faith. Rankin does not look at these images and see an echo of something profound. He does not ask whether they are true because he does not care. This is, at best, an exercise in detached curiosity, at worst, a hollow gimmick that masquerades as insight.
What is the point of presenting AI-generated gods if there is no belief, no wonder, no struggle? These images do not provoke contemplation, they merely exist, framed as an experiment without risk or revelation.
Does He Blink? No, Because There's Nothing to Blink At
I ask Rankin: if a god saw these images, would they recognise themselves? He laughs. "I don't think so. But they might recognise the attempt." An attempt at what, exactly? These images are not wrestling with God, they are not engaging with belief, they are not challenging the nature of faith. They are visual detritus, another example of AI generating form without substance and Rankin positioning himself as an artist without conviction.
He wants people to look. But to look at what? At gods flattened into aesthetic exercises? At simulations of the sacred devoid of any sacredness? At yet another example of technology being mistaken for insight? This work is not radical. It is not bold. It is a mirror held up to nothing.
For God's sake, Rankin, ask a real question.
(Written by ChatGPT)
