Initially, platforms like Fiverr were places where you could hire freelancers to do specialized creative labor using skills that took years to develop. However, in the era of generative AI, many gig workers are adopting this technology to meet client demands. These employee profiles highlight their ability to quickly (and cheaply) create images and videos of almost anything. But often what clients are looking for is dramatic animation inspired by the Christian Bible.
On TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook, it’s very easy to come across AI-generated clips that recreate Bible stories. Like most AI works, these videos tend to have inconsistent aesthetics and are narrated by mechanical voices. Rather than focusing on accurately understanding the details of the Bible, these videos satirically emphasize emotions such as fear and anger that are central to the simplified narrative.
Some videos seem to be borrowed from Pixar projects in their visuals and are clearly aimed at children, while others are more photorealistic and feel like they’re aimed at an older audience. The number of views shows that people are actually looking at these things. However, creators rarely mention the fact that they outsource the labor of producing their videos, rather than creating the content themselves.
The opposite is true on Fiverr, where gig seekers openly talk about their background working on projects on other people’s social accounts. The platform, which laid off 250 employees last fall and pledged to become an “AI-first” company, allows people to upload clips of past work and allows clients to provide comments on their satisfaction. And the Fiverr employees I spoke to for this article said that while some may dislike the AI video slop, work keeps coming in. Scroll through Fiverr and you’ll see people looking for these jobs all over the world, but some of the highest-rated freelancers are based in Africa and South Asia. To some extent, this pattern mirrors the way AI companies have historically outsourced model training and data labeling labor overseas to keep costs down. But all the freelancers I spoke to said they thought this kind of work wasn’t very lucrative on an individual level.
Dave, a Nigerian freelancer with a background in web development and UI/UX design, told me that he first started producing videos several years ago when AI tools became widely available to the public. Dave said he has always loved visually-based storytelling and tools like ChatGPT, Grok, and Leonardo AI have given him an easy way to become a professional storyteller. According to Dave, Fiverr has given him a way to turn his newly acquired skills into cash.
“I saw an opportunity there.” [using AI tools] “Learning traditional animation took too long and I didn’t have many resources. For Al, the learning curve wasn’t as steep, so he was able to figure things out while playing, and eventually came to Fiverr and started selling his skills,” Dave explained.
While Dave has been hired for other types of AI video projects, he said he also takes on Bible-focused work because “the demand is so high” and there are so many people “trying to build YouTube channels in this niche.” This niche is relatively new, the traffic is steady, and Dave feels that some of his clients hire him because they don’t want to be left behind as AI becomes more widespread. I heard something similar from Shelly, a video editor in Pakistan. Sherry produces religious videos in various styles for YouTubers and TikTok accounts.
To my eyes, Sherry’s AI videos didn’t look all that different from what other Fiverr freelancers were offering. Because all this content usually includes That Look™, which has become synonymous with vulgarity. But when I asked Sherry why clients continue to hire them instead of just prompting the videos themselves, they argued that this job requires some kind of expertise.
“I have developed strong prompt writing skills, along with an understanding of storytelling, timing, and visual composition, which allows me to create more polished and engaging videos,” Shelly told me. “I also take charge of the entire process from concept to final editing, saving my clients time and ensuring that the content is professional, unique, and aligned with their goals. The combination of creativity, technical skill, and reliability is what sets my work apart.”
Workers like Sherry and Dave have provided content brands like AI Bible with a relatively cheap and quick way to source labor that can be easily monetized online. These pages have amassed a huge following of people who are serious about their content across various social media platforms. A wider audience may consider this treatment of the Bible somewhat sacrilegious. It certainly feels weird to see biblical figures portrayed as Instagram influencers recording their own videos on iPhones. But the comments section is filled with people claiming that Jesus would laugh. [these videos] He praised the channel for spreading the message of Christ.
The overall visual similarity of these types of videos has a lot to do with the specific tools people are using to create them. Ruaf, another Pakistani freelancer we spoke to over Zoom, walked us through his entire production workflow, starting with asking ChatGPT for ideas for conversations between Biblical characters. We then used ChatGPT to convert that dialogue into a script broken into scenes. This script was sent to Eleven Labs to generate an audio narration track and accompanying captions. After asking ChatGPT to include things like camera direction and shot descriptions in the script, Ruaf fed each scene into Grok to generate visuals that could be edited with AI narration in CapCut.
Ruaf said many other freelancers use similar workflows for their own projects. People in the AI community often share tips on how to work around obstacles such as various platforms’ limits on the number of generations a user can create in a day. But if you watch the video, you’ll see that its overall uniformity is a byproduct of people taking the same general approach to producing it.
The video’s shoddy visuals don’t seem to matter much to the person who commissioned the video or the viewer. It’s entirely possible that some of your viewers are bots. And while this style of content comes off as at least a little blasphemous, the people producing these things don’t care about that because they make money.
