Christian content creators are outsourcing AI slop to gig workers on Fiverr

In the beginning, platforms like Fiverr were places where people could hire freelancers to do specialized creative labor using skills that took years to develop. In the age of generative AI, though, many of these gig workers have embraced the technology in order to meet clients’ demands. These workers’ profiles emphasize that they can quickly (and cheaply) whip up images and videos of just about anything. But often, what their clients are looking for are dramatic animations inspired by the Christian Bible.

On TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook it is very easy to stumble across AI-generated clips that retell stories from the Bible. Like most AI slop, these videos tend to have an inconsistent aesthetic to them, and they’re narrated by mechanical-sounding voices. Rather than focusing on getting details from the Bible right, these videos cartoonishly emphasize emotions like fear and anger that are central to their simplified narratives.

Some of the videos — whose visuals appear to be borrowed from Pixar projects — are clearly aimed at children, while others — which are more photorealistic — feel like they’re meant for older viewers. You can tell from the view counts that people are actually watching these things. But the creators rarely mention the fact that they outsource the videos’ production labor instead of making the content themselves.

It’s the opposite on Fiverr, where gig-seekers are open about their history of working on projects for other people’s social accounts. The platform — which committed to becoming an “AI-first” company last fall when it laid off 250 employees — allows people to upload clips of their previous work, and clients can provide comments about their satisfaction. And each of the Fiverr workers that I spoke with for this story said that, as much as some people might abhor AI video slop, the gigs keep rolling in. When you scroll through Fiverr, there are people all over the world looking for these jobs, but some of the highest-rated freelancers are based in Africa and South Asia. To a certain extent, that pattern mirrors the way that AI firms have historically outsourced their model training and data labeling labor abroad to keep costs down. But the freelancers I talked to all said that they see this kind of work as far less extractive on a personal level.

Dave, a Nigerian freelancer with a background in web development and UI / UX design, told me that he first got into video production a few years back as AI tools became more widely available to the public. Dave said that he’s always had a deep love for visually driven narratives, and tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Leonardo AI gave him an easy way to become a professional storyteller. Fiverr, Dave said, gave him a way to turn his newly acquired skills into cash.

Though Dave gets hired for other kinds of AI video projects, he said that he takes on Bible-focused gigs because “the demand is quite high” and there are a lot of people who “are trying to build YouTube channels in this niche.” The niche is relatively new with solid traffic, and Dave feels like some of his clients hire him because they “do not want to be left behind” as AI takes off. I heard similar things from Sherry, a Pakistani video editor who has generated religious videos for YouTubers and TikTok accounts in a variety of different styles.

To my eye, Sherry’s AI videos did not seem all that distinct from what other Fiverr freelancers are offering because all of this content usually has That Look™ that’s become synonymous with slop. But when I asked Sherry why clients keep hiring them rather than just prompting up videos themselves, they insisted that doing this work requires a certain kind of expertise.

Workers like Sherry and Dave have given content brands like AI Bible a way of sourcing relatively cheap and fast labor that can be easily monetized online. Across different social media platforms, these pages have cultivated massive followings of people who engage with their content in earnest. You might think that more viewers would see this kind of treatment of the Bible as being somewhat sacrilegious. It definitely feels odd seeing biblical figures depicted as Instagram influencers recording videos of themselves with iPhones. But the comments sections are filled with people insisting that “Jesus would laugh at [these videos] too,” and praising the channels for spreading Christ’s message.

Ruaf, another Pakistani freelancer I spoke with via Zoom, walked me through his entire production workflow, which began with asking ChatGPT for ideas that could be turned into dialogue between characters from the Bible. He then used ChatGPT to turn that dialogue into a script broken into scenes. That script was sent over to ElevenLabs in order to generate an audio narration track and accompanying captions. And after asking ChatGPT to include things like camera directions and shot descriptions in the script, Ruaf fed each scene into Grok in order to generate visuals that could be edited together with the AI narration in CapCut.

The videos’ slop-y visuals don’t really seem to be an issue for the people commissioning them or the viewers — some of whom could very well be bots. And while this style of content comes across as at least a little bit blasphemous, the people cranking these things out aren’t concerned about that because there’s money to be made.