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

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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.

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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.

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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.