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.
But unlike AI slop on Facebook that we revealed is made mostly in India and Vietnam for a Western audience by pragmatically hacking Facebook’s algorithms in order to make a living, The AI Bible videos are made by Christians, for Christians, and judging by the YouTube comments, they unanimously love them.
“This video truly reminded me that prayer is powerful even in silence. Thank you for encouraging us to lean into God’s strength,” one commenter wrote. “May every person who watches this receive quiet healing, and may peace visit their heart in unexpected ways.”
“Thank you for sharing God’s Word so beautifully,” another commenter wrote. “Your channel is a beacon of light in a world that needs it.”
I first learned about the videos and how well they were received by a Christian audience from self-described “AI filmmaker” PJ Accetturo, who noted on X that there’s a “massive gap in the market: AI Bible story films. Demand is huge. Supply is almost zero. Audiences aren’t picky about fidelity—they just want more.” Accetturo also said he’s working on his own AI-generated Bible video for a different publisher about the story of Jonah.
Unlike most of the AI slop we’ve reported on so far, the AI Bible channel is the product of a well-established company in Christian media, Pray.com, which claims to make “the world’s #1 app for faith and prayer.”
“The AI Bible is a revolutionary platform that uses cutting-edge generative AI to transform timeless biblical stories into immersive, hyper-realistic experiences,” its site explains. “ Whether you’re exploring your faith, seeking inspiration, or simply curious, The AI Bible offers a fresh perspective that bridges ancient truths with modern creativity.”
I went searching for Christian commentary about generative AI to see whether Pray.com’s full embrace of this new and highly controversial technology was unique among faith-based organizations, and was surprised to discover the opposite. I found oped, after oped and commentary from pastors about how AI was a great opportunity Christians needed to embrace.
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.
Unlike other audiences, like Star Wars fans who passionately rejected an AI-generated proof-of-concept short AI-generated film recently, Laughlin also told me she wasn’t surprised that some Christians commented that they love the low quality AI-generated videos from the AI Bible.
“The metrics for success are totally different,” she said. “This isn’t necessarily about creativity. It’s about spreading the word, and the more you can do that, the kind of acceleration that AI offers, the more you are doing God’s work.”
Laughlin said that the Christian early adoption of new technologies and media goes back 100 years. Christian media flourished on the radio, then turned to televangelism, and similarly made the transition to online media, with an entire world of religious influencers, sites, and apps.
“The fear among Christians is that if they don’t immediately jump onto a technology they’re going to be left behind, and they’re going to start losing people,” Laughlin said. The thinking is that if Christians are “not high tech in a high tech country where that’s what’s really grabbing people’s attention, then they lose the war for attention to the other side, and losing the war for attention to the other side has really drastic spiritual consequences if you think of it in that frame,” she said.
Laughlin said that, especially among evangelical Christians, there’s a willingness to adopt new technologies that veers into boosterism. She said she saw Christians similarly try to jump on the metaverse hype train back when Silicon Valley insisted that virtual reality was the future, with many Christians asking how they’re going to build a Metaverse church because that’s where they thought people were going to be.
I asked Laughlin why it seems like secular and religious positions on new technologies seemed to have flipped. When I was growing up, it seemed like religious organizations were very worried that video games, for example, were corrupting young souls and turning them against God, especially when they overlapped with Satanic Panics around games like Doom or Diablo. When it comes to AI, it seems like it’s mostly secular culture—academics, artists, and other creatives—who shun generative AI for exploiting human labor and the creative spirit. In fact, many AI accelerationists accuse any critics of the technology or a desire to regulate it as a kind of religious moral panic. Christians, on the other hand, see AI as part of the inevitable march of technological progress, and they want to be a part of it.
“It’s like the famous Marshall McLuhan quote, ‘the medium is the message,’ right? If they’re getting out there in the message of the time, that means the message is still fresh. Christians are still relevant in the AI age, and they’re doing it and like that in itself is all that matters,” Laughlin said. “Even if it’s clearly something that anybody could rightfully sneer at if you had any sense of what makes good or bad media aesthetics.”
