Why Do Christians Love AI Slop? (404 Media on AI-slop videos about the Bible flooding online platforms)

[highplainsdem]

https://www.404media.co/why-do-christians-love-ai-slop/

A crowd of people dressed in rags stare up at a tower so tall it reaches into the heavens. Fire rains down from the sky on to a burning city. A giant in armor looms over a young warrior. An ocean splits as throngs of people walk into it. Each shot only lasts a couple of seconds, and in that short time they might look like they were taken from a blockbuster fantasy movie, but look closely and you’ll notice that each carries all the hallmarks of AI-generated slop: the too smooth faces, the impossible physics, subtle deformations, and a generic aesthetic that’s hard to avoid when every pixel is created by remixing billions of images and videos in training data that was scraped from the internet.

“Every story. Every miracle. Every word,” the text flashes dramatically on screen before cutting to silence and the image of Jesus on the cross. With 1.7 million views, this video, titled “What if The Bible had a movie trailer…?” is the most popular on The AI Bible YouTube channel, which has more than 270,000 subscribers, and it perfectly encapsulates what the channel offers. Short, AI-generated videos that look very much like the kind of AI slop we have covered at 404 Media before. Another YouTube channel of AI-generated Bible content, Deep Bible Stories, has 435,000 subscribers, and is the 73rd most popular podcast on the platform according to YouTube’s own ranking. This past week there was also a viral trend of people using Google’s new AI video generator, Veo 3, to create influencer-style social media videos of biblical stories. Jesus-themed content was also some of the earliest and most viral AI-generated media we’ve seen on Facebook, starting with AI-generated images of Jesus appearing on the beach and escalating to increasingly ridiculous images, like shrimp Jesus.

-snip-

Corrina Laughlin, an assistant professor at Loyola Marymount University and the author of Redeem All: How Digital Life Is Changing Evangelical Culture, a book about the intersection of American evangelicalism and tech innovation, told me she was not surprised.

“It's not surprising to me to see Christians producing tons of content using AI because the idea is that God gave them this technology—that’s something I heard over and over again [from Christians]—and they have to use it for him and for his glory,” she said.

-snip-

There are other reasons not mentioned that are typical of fundamentalists.

One is gullibility. Fundamentalists are much more likely to overlook flaws in anything with a Christian theme (including the orange thing in the White House, criminal as he is, since he declares himself a champion of Christians).

Another is lack of concern for anyone not sharing their cause - like the artists whose intellectual property was stolen to train the AI.

And a third, for all too many fundamentalists, is complete lack of concern about reality. They'll believe the AI disinformation they generate is the truth. A fundie once told me they thought Frank Peretti's ridiculous Christian horror novel This Present Darkness

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Present_Darkness

really WAS the truth. Someone like that won't hesitate to use AI to peddle their delusions.

[tanyev]

1. Because Thomas Kinkade is no longer available.

[Silent Type]

2. I guess AI is the modern version of the Jesus Saves cards left on public toilets by religious zealots.

[highplainsdem]

6. I stopped at a truck stop in the Bible Belt years ago and saw a stack of "How to use your mud flaps for Jesus" flyers

by the cash register.

[Silent Type]

10. I'm still laughing as I type. I live in that Bible Belt and don't doubt it.

[TheProle]

3. AI's capacity for illustrating human fantasy brings religious delusion to life.

[Gore1FL]

4. Google scarlett johansson beautiful cabin crew

I don't know why they are tagged this way, but there are some unbelievably strange Christian AI images with those hashtags from police carrying giant bibles through the ocean, to waterlogged airplanes with Jesus in the back. I saw one of Jesus hooked up to life-saving devices in a hospital bed holding a sign that says "Like this, It's my birthday."

Weird shit.

[highplainsdem]

11. Lots of images in the Reddit thread I'm linking to below. Pure garbage. Complete waste of

computing and electricity and time. Great way to waste resources and dumb people down.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1c01tah/i_searched_for_beautiful_cabin_crew_on_facebook

See the replies there as well as the OP or whatever they call it on Reddit.

[JHB]

5. AI lets them all be as maunderingly awful as Jon McNaughton

[highplainsdem]

9. There's been so much AI slop circulating that I almost forgot about McNaughton's dreadful paintings.

[JHB]

20. Yes, they've always had that "slop" sensibility even when painted by a human

Exhibit B: Ben Carson's "Jesus and Me" painting

[SARose]

7. Because evangelical christians want to see the wrath of God

Descend on people they hate - Catholics, Jews, LGBTQ, brown skin people, fornicators, women and anyone else who disagrees with their dogma.

I don’t know what Jesus says in their Bible but I know what He says in mine

3 Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
4 Blessed are those who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
5 Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the earth.
6 Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be filled.
7 Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
8 Blessed are the pure in heart,
for they will see God.
9 Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
10 Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
11 Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me.
12 Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Matt 5:3-12.

Did He stutter?

[Basso8vb]

8. Because they've always had a penchant for hokey garbage.

[Renew Deal]

12. I don't think its limited to religion

I've seen it in other areas like sports and news. I think these videos are created to collect ad money. Feed them a script, tell them to be creative, and post on YouTube. I ran into some elaborate story about some swiss guard receiving a note only after Pope Francis died. I could not find any other source for the information and the timing didn't make sense. The timing was impossible when it was posted, but weeks and years on, it's not noticeable.

I think it's large-scale legal ad fraud. What makes it legal is the video is really created, the viewers are real, the ads are run. But the content is either regurgitated or fabricated.

Don't mistake this as a religious issue. It happens in many areas of life.

[highplainsdem]

14. Oh, I don't think it's only about religion. There are countless AI-generated fake obits about living celebrities on

YouTube. Fake news stories about scandals they're supposedly involved in. And yes, this fits generally into the news category, but these are designed to pop up when you search for music by an artist, and so on.

I'd love to know how many more videos are on YouTube, period, due to AI.

This 404 Media story on Christian AI slop struck me as interesting, anyway, for the "God gave us this tech" angle.

[Renew Deal]

16. It is interesting

You can use religion to justify anything and then claim satan created the bad things

[wcmagumba]

13. Gullible Moran's...I had a friend back in college days (I'm late 60s now) who lived in a small mobile home...

He was a talker (and bs artist) and loved to invite any Jehovah's Witnesses or others to come in and talk...He ran rings around them logically (he was always nice and treated them with respect) until usually they excused themselves from his house...kind of mean maybe but these folks ask for it (imo) by intruding on people's privacy with their garbage...not really about the OP and AI but I still like to tell this story...excuse please.

[hatrack]

15. My guess would be that they have really, really shitty taste in art . . .

But that's just me.

[Initech]

18. Also music, movies, food, politics, news networks...

[hatrack]

19. Like Big Boy, Socialist Realism never really went away . . .

It just came back all churchy.

[Initech]

17. Because they love anything that speaks their language.

Seriously, I could be a millionaire if I just made sappy Christian conservative content for the rest of my life.

[ibegurpard]

21. Because religion is their hobby and drug

Slop AI is being used for EVERYTHING