As the vertical, short-form, 30-second-is-the-sweetspot style of content grows on the internet, we are seeing whatever means necessary to feed the economy of endless slop. Particularly of interest– AI-generated images and video.
That is to say: there is a ton of slop made from AI online.
I do not want to grace this post with some of those images, they who must not be pasted, but it is something you have inevitably already come across in one form or another. An “Italian Brainrot” of a potato mixed with a guy. Weird videos of the impossible, all with the uncanny “piss filter” of yellow stain, a logically incoherent finger, or one of the 20 set-phrases/emotions that AI is prone to regurgitate ad infinitum.
The strange and unfortunate tie-in is with religiosity.
There was a time before the bible was translated and free thought was allowed, men were lead to the pulpits with the gleeful ignorance of the actual, abhorrent contents of the bible. Nobody could read the nature of atrocities, or pitiful adolescent behaviors of Yahweh, or the forever-running misogyny and slavery support of the bible because it was locked and contained in Latin.
And, with the eventual translation, and mass distribution, and the way of free thinking, we, well, the age of free thinking.
But one huge challenge AI poses in generated fake, altered, and synthetic images is that it drowns out so much truth with fake noise, that the average reader and watcher cannot tell what is fake or real anymore.
The Logical Reason through Apologetics
Apologetics is the field of defending a religious faith. Popular apologists online include Trent Horn, Frank Turek, William Lane Craig, and others.
Apologetics attempts to use logical arguments to prove the truth of, for example, Christianity, against opposing worldviews such as other religions or lack of religion itself (atheism).
But often times, or perhaps inevitably every time, the apologist runs out of ammunition. That is to say, because there is no logical coherence with the myth of Christianity in our world, let alone the existence of a god or Gods or any non-physical thing you try to prove, apologists will be pushed against a wall.
How do they squiggle out?
Misdirection — Simply ignore the argument, and pull somewhere else. (Perhaps you have a legitimate argument against the ethics of persecuting LGBT people within Christianity, and the Christian has no response. Instead they say that LGBT people are trying to poison their kids, or infect them with transgender ideology or marxism or whatever buzzword.)
Lying — Simply saying things like we have proof of the resurrection, the Shroud of Turin is real and verified, one lie to me recently was saying that all cosmologists agree the universe had a beginning Not true, this is not agreed upon, and there are many different trains of thought.
There are plenty, but these are the main two. Now, how is apologetics relevant to AI slop?
Well, AI Slop is a large tool used in the engine of continuously generating short form content, as mentioned earlier. The newest version of Sora lets you make 5 second clips at a time, thus is prone just to this format.
You can see the completely insensitive response to the recent Camp Mystic flooding, where over 100 people, including children, died due to rivers flooding in Texas. They generated images of barefoot campers running in heaven with drenched shirts out of a river. Geeze, there really is no taste with many religious people.
Creating shot form content, memes, punchlines like this that lack substance is now accelerated with the quick ability to add in prompts and create videos, images, whatever and just create fuel to the fire. Thus, the real reason religion succeeds, in addition to the misdirection and lying above, is with the following
Enforcing Emotional Adherence — This is not something that will immediately work on a non-believer, but is intended to be fuel for the current adherent. You have a particular feeling for Jesus, or Mohammed, or whoever in your bosom and believe very well in the supernatural, divine, and your particular religion. The crux of religious apologia and argumentation is to continually emphasize this feeling you have and ensure you stay subscribed to the package that is your religion.
Formula: Take Poor argument, subtract counterargument, multiply quantity by 100
Simply put, you can now do the above three key tactics– lying, misdirecting, and emotional adherence enforcement, and now do this at scale. Previously, even just editing a shabby video, or writing shabby articles (like yours truly) would require at minimum hours of work.
People have made machines to churn out endless content while they sleep.
You can set up AI agents to do this for you, you can write some simple code (or even use nocode) to create a feedback loop to make the prompts, take the prompts into a sheet, put it into an AI, put it into a video editor, format the images, create the images, create the video, add the narration, export the file… Ready to go. Done in moments, and without any of your work.
It sounds like a dream made true, you basically have a factory-ready assembly line for free or low cost with all of the AI potpourri that exists today.
The issue is that what is being produced isn’t cars or food or furniture pieces or anything useful, rather, mindless slop. Now with the flavor of religiosity.
An example with my video on the resurrection
He says “Give Me 60 Seconds, and I’ll Prove Christianity is true.”
- “Literally no serious historian denies Jesus existed”
- Lie. Richard Carrier, Robert Price, and other scholars are “serious” and deny Jesus existed.
- “No one denies Christian was crucified under Pontius Pilate”
- Lie. Most historians admit this is theologically motivated storytelling.
- “And that his followers believe he rose again from the dead.”
- Misdirect. Potentially true his followers believed he rose from the dead, but does not prove truth of Christianity. Also, some accounts suggest that the early Christians did not literally believe in the truth of the mythologies of Jesus. Additionally, believing something does not make it real. You can have a vision experience, believe it, and have it not be true.
And, this goes on for 60 seconds. A short-format video is able to give these bullet points, punchy, and without room for rebuttal. The lasting impression was there was a strong “gotcha” argument for Jesus, and the viewer continues to scroll on. Maybe to more similar content.
The lasting affect is the encouragement of tampered critical thinking and accepting of arguments without any criticism. Notice it takes me equally as long, and longer, to walk down each of the points from the original video, but there is just not enough attention span afforded.
The Lower the IQ The Greater the Congregation Size
And for my next controversial headline, well, here it is.
When you critically examine a religion for what it is, you are more then likely to leave it. It does not conform with reality as we observe it. It does not stand to scrutiny, and it does not give room for critical thought.
With the continuous growth of social media, short-form media, and now the endless pipeline of AI keeping the churn going, the end effect is to create humans who will consume and, well, consume more. A new society of a deliberately, manufacturedly consented class of people who will not just watch TikTok and short form content on end, but now have an even lower bar for the quality of said content.
The above video I criticize is made by a real human, but the images are all generated from Chat GPT or something alike. Even with just the supplement of AI generated content, now the growth of misinformation, religiously oriented in particular, can continue to fester.
Some Observations on the Greater Internet
Mind you, religious parts of the internet are just one facet, but the ideologies people hold permeate everywhere and in all parts. One such ideology that goes hand-in-hand with religious subjugation is right-wing thought. As the filters get taken off bit by bit, and the mechanism to draft and publish more slop grows, we will see a take off of more conservative, nationalist, authoritarian, and even fascist movements online.
They’re all barking up the same tree– appeal to authority, removing rights from minorities, and it is the exact game people in positions of power with misaligned goals for humanity want you to play.
The literal white house, the highest seat of government in the world’s foremost superpower, now posts regular, mentally ill-prone AI slop. The latest video Donald Trump posted was an AI-generated amalgamation of him in a golden plane taking a golden liquid diarrhea over huge crowds doing No Kings Protests across the country.
… Why …
That is not the first though. Before was Pope Trump, Darth Sith Trump, and muscular America-macho Trump… all romanticized images of himself made with poorly prompted AI images.
When you don’t have good taste, and misaligned morals and ethics, you find no issue with contributing to and diving in the toxic cesspool of nonsensical AI garbage. Not that there cannot be a good use for AI everywhere, but that AI can be used anywhere in any way, it is abused in that way.
The strange part about this now is, from a quality perspective, I am seeing all matters of content that abstain from generated, AI-based material, are doing much better in terms of quality and consistency.
Whatever the case is, many people will not filter for themselves such quality or consistency and simply eat what is served to them. So long as that continues to happen, and companies continue to allow it and profit from it, then you will see a continuous neo-evangelization through Chat GPT-powered short form videos.
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