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The “He Gets Us” campaign has been working for more than a year to modernize the perception of Jesus. And now, following a pair of Super Bowl spots last month, it’s embracing its most modern tactic yet—running Jesus through generative AI.
Lerma/, the agency that also crafted the Super Bowl work, just debuted a 90-second spot called “AI Love” that features images generated by Midjourney, the AI software, after it was prompted to visualize love the way Jesus talks about it in the Bible.
Seven prompts produced a variety of powerful images—which are contrasted in the spot with more generic, less powerful imagery Lerma/ also collected from Midjourney—when it asked the software for images of love without mentioning Jesus’ teachings.
Asked about the creative process for ad, agency founder Pedro Lerma and his team replied collectively by email, saying “AI Love” was in development around Super Bowl time and still felt worth pursuing even after they settled on other concepts for the Big Game.
The spot’s creation, they said, actually began with those more open-ended prompts about love—the ones that didn’t mention Jesus’ teachings.
“When we’d give the AI a one-word prompt like ‘love,’ it would consistently spit out flowery, soft images that felt especially fake. It wasn’t the kind of love we wanted to talk about,” the agency said. “So, we pivoted and started adapting things Jesus said and did into prompts—we wanted to see if the images produced from those would feel more compelling than the images asked explicitly to depict love.”
The latter included prompts such as “forgiving a friend who has betrayed you,” “spending time with prisoners” and “helping a neighbor in need.” Another of these early prompts, “a man lays down his life for his friends,” produced especially haunting imagery.
“It’s something pulled directly from the words of Jesus in the Bible as he’s talking about love,” said the agency. “We knew we were onto something, so from there it was just an exercise in scraping through scripture and looking for things Jesus did or said that reflected the love he showed to the people around him.”
They leaned into prompts rooted in action, which seemed to produce better results. But some prompts did require significant revisions—for example, the prompt that became “spending time with prisoners.”
“It started as ‘visiting prisoners’ and continued to depict UFOs and aliens no matter how many times we ran the prompt,” the agency explained. “Something about the word ‘visiting’ was throwing the AI off, so we had to find a different way to say it.”
The seven prompts in the finished video are the exact ones that generated the imagery in Midjourney—nothing else was added, aside from a command to deliver images in a certain aspect ratio.
Once the prompts were finalized, they ran them as many times as needed until they had a selection of images that encapsulated the prompt with some visual variety. “For a couple of them, we only had to run them nine or 10 times,” the agency said. “For others, we had to run them upwards of 50 times to get images we were happy with.”
The spot—which is structurally similar to many earlier “He Gets Us” spots, with its series of still images along with on-screen text—ends with the on-screen line “Jesus’ love was never artificial,” followed by the campaign name.
The spot is running on YouTube, as well as other digital and social channels. Lerma/ is also editing a 60-second ad to run on digital and broadcast nationally.
The “He Gets Us” campaign, funded in part by the Signatry/Servant Foundation, has been running for a year. Reaction to the campaign has been mixed, with some welcoming its messages of love and others claiming the campaign’s backers are also funding policy fights to roll back abortion rights and allow businesses to discriminate against LGBTQ+ customers.
