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The face of Jesus? AI recreates an image of Jesus Christ based on the Shroud of Turin
AI images of Jesus Christ begin to surface as some researchers point to new evidence that could validate that the Shroud of Turin was used to bury the religious figure.
The Shroud of Turin has been used by AI to recreate an image of what Jesus Christ could have looked like just after his crusification. A website dedicated to compiling news and information about the historical artifact describes it as “the single most studied artifact in human history.”
Though the authenticity of the Should of Turin is still hotly debated, with some historians casting it aside as a medieval invention, thus, the use of cloth to recreate an image of Jesus Christ has its problems. Could the man depicted be Christ, another man living at the time, or an invention altogether? The cloth was carbon-dated in the 1980s, and scientists who examined it reported with 95 percent confidence that it was produced anywhere between 1260 and 1390; in other words, far too late to be an authentic artifact from the time.
Though the scientific consensus stands closer to the notion that the object is not the burial cloth of Jesus Christ, that hasn’t stopped new research from emerging that deploys new techniques to bolster the case that it could be more than 2000 years old. In 2022, a group of Italian scientists tested the threads using advanced X-ray methods and argued that it is much older than what the carbon dating suggested in the 1980s. However, the findings come with a slew of caveats about what temperatures the cloth was kept at over the two millennia and how dramatic deviations from what they can expect could impact the results.
AI images begin to surface based on the Shroud of Turin
The hope that it could be an authentic relic has led some to use it as inspiration in their attempts to use artificial intelligence to recreate images of Christ. One image shared by Eric Sammons, the Executive Director of Crisis Publication, shared one such example that is remarkably similar to images of Jesus that have appeared over the last five hundred years.
The representation of Jesus in art has shifted over time as generations have carried forward his scripture but have lost connection with the person. The fact that the image recreated depicts such a modern rendition of Jesus Christ causes some skeptics to see the recreation as further evidence that it is likely from the medieval era.