Document Type
Article
Publication Title
MRS Journal of Arts, Humanities and Literature
Abstract
This study reframes two durable tropes—the ―God Prompt‖ and the deus ex machina—as analytic lenses for understanding how contemporary generative systems stage beginnings and endings of cultural production. The ―God Prompt‖ denotes command-driven synthesis in which minimal textual instructions instantiate content on demand, crystallizing a production loop of input, model execution, and post hoc evaluation that orients anticipation toward instantaneous yield and controllable variation. The deus ex machina names an externally imposed resolution that interrupts causal development—historically a crane-borne god, functionally an algorithmic override—thereby concentrating attention on closure mechanics rather than world-building continuity. Read together, the pair offers a compact comparative grid: locus of initiative (ex ante instruction versus ex post intervention), degree of system opacity (foregrounded prompting versus backstage mechanism), temporal signature (generation-as-inception versus intervention-as-termination), and authorship dynamics (distributed cueing versus imposed solution). The article operationalizes this grid across heterogeneous materials—prompt marketplaces, persona scripts, interface logs, and narrative case studies—to show how users internalize the ―grammar of prompting‖ while platforms increasingly standardize ―mechanics of closure.‖ The analysis yields testable predictions: longer or more structured prompts should increase perceived user agency and authorial claim, whereas abrupt machine-led resolutions should depress perceived coherence unless licensed by genre convention or interface signaling. By treating both tropes as cognitive scaffolds and infrastructural habits rather than theological or ethical claims, the study supplies a portable vocabulary for design research, narratology, and science-and-technology studies to evaluate how generative media choreograph control, surprise, and the price of narrative closure.
Publication Date
9-2025
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Recommended Citation
Hutson, James, "The God Prompt and Deus Ex Machina: Techno-Theological Tropes and Operational Metaphors in Generative Media" (2025). Faculty Scholarship. 767.
https://digitalcommons.lindenwood.edu/faculty-research-papers/767
Included in
Artificial Intelligence and Robotics Commons, Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons