This summer, I was sad to see a defaced image of Christ’s face circulating on X (formerly Twitter). The warped image, derived from the Shroud of Turin, hadn’t been made by anti-theists aiming at blasphemy. The image was generated using AI by a British tabloid and was shared by erring but good-faith Catholics.
The Shroud of Turin is miraculous for preserving, through an unknown means, the image of Christ. It is not a photograph. When its shadowy image of the Holy Face sharpens our hunger to know Christ more intimately, we should seek that consummation in the Eucharist, rather than turning to AI to go beyond what God had given.
Unfortunately, the widespread accessibility of AI has increased the temptation to turn to these tools to generate devotional art—or worse, pastoral advice. For now, my children (ages four, two, and newborn) are too young to use a computer or discuss the machine learning techniques these tools rely on, but I still see it as part of my job as a parent to teach them how to value art and artists. They will grow up in a world saturated by AI slop, where the purpose of creating and contemplating beauty is increasingly obscured. One choice in the design of Word on Fire Votive books gave me a helpful way to begin my children’s education.
On the back of Votive books for young children are prominent photos of the authors and illustrators. My children were interested right away, because they loved to point out “Dada! Dada!” on the back of Saintly Creatures, but they were confused and curious about the non-Mama woman pictured alongside him.
It was easy to explain (they’ve seen my stick-legged dogs) that I was not the artist who made the enchanting pictures of the saints that were alongside their father’s stories. They wanted to know more about Anita Barghigiani—had they met her? Had Daddy? When other Votive books arrived, they were more interested in finding the photos and asking who had created this book and why.
It’s easy for me to present children’s books as primarily the stories they tell, neglecting their reality as made objects. I’ll confess I read titles aloud more often than authors’ names, assuming my children didn’t care. But focusing on the artisan behind the art reminds them that these pictures were made for them.
Each of the children’s books on our “God shelf” has a human hand, heart, and intellect behind it. Each book grew out of the love the author and illustrator had for God, for beauty, and for the little readers to come. Thinking about the work of artists as subcreators and communicators of love will, I hope, offer my children an inoculation against the AI art they encounter in the future. No matter how pleasing the output looks, AI-generated art cannot be offered in love and is not the fruit of contemplation.
Even my own art exceeds AI slop in this respect. When I tried to draw a lion for my eldest daughter, it was, without question, worse than an image she might find elsewhere. (In fact, she burst into angry tears at how bad it was.) But it was unquestionably offered out of love for her, personally. Drawing it forced me to think harder about what a lion was, and then to meditate on how very, very short I fell of God’s grandeur in making it.
Focusing on the artisan behind the art reminds them that these pictures were made for them.
In 1952, long before AI “art,” philosopher Josef Pieper was concerned with “how man can be saved from becoming a totally passive consumer. . . . How can man preserve and safeguard the foundation of his spiritual dimension and an uncorrupted relationship to reality?” It was because I read his essay “Learning How to See Again” that I wanted to draw terrible lions for my children and for my own sake.
Pieper emphasizes it is not enough to abstain from bad art (though that fast is fruitful). Each of us, even if not a talented artist, need to catch a little of the artist’s habit of looking. “Long before a creation is completed,” Pieper writes, “the artist has gained for himself another and more intimate achievement . . . the artist will be able to perceive with new eyes the abundant wealth of all visible reality.”
As my children grow and learn perspective and shading, I hope to study a little alongside them. They will, I hope, exceed me in their skill, but all of us will be brought to a deeper awareness of the richness of the world, the necessity for an artist to make a choice of what small slice of creation she will frame for the page. The artist is an intermediary between the world and the final viewer, leavening the world with her point of view. A Christian artist, even when showing the darker parts of the fallen world, can produce art marked by love when she wills the good of those who will see it and paints in thanksgiving for her talent.
The more my children flip to the back of their books, not to discover how the story ends but to see who decided to tell them the story, the more confident I am they will feel the hollowness of a story without an author, an artist without an eye.