Jesus is punching Satan on Facebook.
Both are in the boxing ring. Jesus is wearing a pair of white boxing shorts with his name embroidered on the waistband. She is beyond belief not only does she have six pack abs but every muscle in her body is boiling. Jesus is hitting Satan directly on the chin, a knockout blow. “Nunca te arrepentiras de darle me gusta a esta foto” — “You will never regret liking this photo”–The caption reads in part, followed by a bunch of spammy hashtags. The post has over 600,000 likes.
In another image, Jesus' eyes are icy blue. A bloody cross adorns his forehead. He looks like actor Jared Leto. It has over 240,000 likes. This is just one of the hundreds of variations published by One Page. In another, he wears a giant Coachella-esque flower crown.
Hot AI Jesus is risen. The Son of God, as rendered by modern artificial intelligence, is chiseled and has amazingly good hair. (This is not to be confused with another type of AI-generated crab, Jesus.) These images of Christ are sometimes extremely popular on Facebook and Instagram. Jesus, hot or not, is a staple in this age of online AI junk. That AI is to Facebook spam as water lilies are to Monet, and dancers are to Degas. Spend enough time scrolling through the AI wastelands of social media, and chances are you'll come across it in all its glory. He raises several questions about social media, religion, and art, the most fundamental of which is: Why on earth does AI treat the Son of God as such a smoke show?
This is actually the easiest to answer. As I've written before, AI image tools create good-looking people by default. “Ask [AI to generate] Anyone,” Hani Farid, a professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information, told me. “Ask for a professor, an engineer, a plumber, an electrician, a firefighter, a police officer, a nurse, anything.” This is likely because the datasets these tools are trained on are biased toward warmth: celebrity images are widely available and thus in digital image libraries. They are overrepresented. To the extent that creative AI can be trained on social media posts, well: people tend to post flattering pictures of themselves online There are explanations. He told me that there may be an algorithmic feedback loop at play, that individual users of generative-AI tools choose the most visually appealing outputs, as the “correct” ones. Or maybe tech companies have deliberately created image-making products that make hot people, because people like images of hot people. In any case, the bias is real: Adobe previously told me that it noticed a trend towards warmth in its model (and works to eliminate its bias accordingly); OpenAI has similarly acknowledged that its DALL-E tool has this problem.
(Jesus isn't the only religious figure looking like an influencer on Instagram: An account dedicated to “creating unique styles of Catholic saints” features photos of some of the yet-to-be-announced Looks like a cast. game of thrones Spin-offs featuring only really, really ridiculously good-looking people. (Like most AI religious creations I've encountered, the saints are almost all white, despite the long debate about the whiteness of such figures.)
Hot Jesus looks great to users on Facebook, where they are routinely posted to generate engagement. Many of these posts are accompanied by a demanding caption. “Why do pictures like this never trend?” they ask over and over in an almost threatening manner. The faithful are challenged to comment “Amen.” And many accounts do. But not all of these comments are necessarily left by real people. Jason Kobler, a journalist and co-founder of the technology news site 404 Media (and one of the world's foremost historians of weird Facebook AI art), tried an experiment: He ran about 300 accounts. Messaged those who commented on AI-generated. -art posts, and only four responses from the net, suggest that at least some of this engagement may be from bots. Generally, the more a photo is on social media, the more people the platform's algorithm shows it to. Popularity begets popularity. Kobler suspects the images are run by bots, which are programmed to react to the images. Engagement makes photos more likely to be shown to more Facebook users, potentially including a substantial number of real humans. The mysterious people running these AI-junk Facebook pages must have some financial incentive to create this spam, though it's not exactly clear how they're profiting from it. Georgetown colleague Josh Goldstein, who wrote a research paper on these types of pages, told me that he and his co-author suspect that these spammers build large audiences and then use them to generate revenue. Take advantage of eyeballs, perhaps by posting links to spammy ad-laden websites.
When I reached out to Meta to ask if HotJesus violates their content policies — or if the company has any insight into how much engagement with the images is real — he didn't respond. . The company allows but does not require users to disclose when images are created with AI. However, photos can be automatically labeled as such if the company's systems detect that they were generated by AI. Meta, more broadly, isn't anti-AI art, it's building AI art tools within Instagram and its Meta AI chatbot. (Metta's AI, however, refuses to draw images of Jesus: “I can't draw images of religious figures,” it told my editor this morning.) “I don't know how. [Hot Jesus] would violate company policies, Brian Fishman, a former policy director at Meta who has since co-founded Cinder, a trust and safety platform, told me. “These kinds of allegorical images are not exactly misinformation, even if people find them offensive,” he explained.
Is Hot AI Jesus Disgusting? These images are based on the history of the American evangelical tradition, David Morgan, professor of religious studies at Duke and author The Forge of Vision: A Visual History of Modern Christianity, said to me. Billy Sunday, a famous athlete turned preacher in the early 1900s, will shadowbox Satan on stage – projecting an AI-generated image of Jesus knocking down Satan. By the 60s, Jesus is depicted as aggressively muscular. The 90s and 2000s also featured hypermasculine representations. I asked Morgan if he saw Hot Jesus aggressively, and he told me he would when he stopped judging Mel Gibson. gave The Passion of Christ Come out. He will ask evangelicals how they feel about the film's brutality, which some critics have likened to pornographic content. “They look at it through a very thick set of religious glasses,” he explained, “that turn violence — machismo — into a triumphant proclamation of American masculinity.”
Like Morgan, Christine Cobis du Mez, a historian and author Jesus and John Wayne, alluding to 20th-century concerns that Jesus had become too soft and effeminate. By Warner Salman Head of Christ, in which Jesus appears especially gentle, fuel these concerns. People started saying,We need a more rugged, masculine Jesus.” Du Meez told me. “And that's when you veered toward more of a combative type of look.” Hot AI Jesus almost feels like a fusion of both traditions: the warrior Jesus and the handsome Jesus. Perhaps these AI tools Picking up both themes in our data sets, and supercharging them.
Jesus, in some ways, is always a reflection of the culture of the day. So it's only natural that its current imagery will adopt the heavy-handed, airbrushed style of AI image generators. The only remaining question is how long he'll stick around: Kubler, the reporter, told me he's already seen some AI art trends come and go. “Once this type of content falls out of favor, it seems like these fan pages will stop making it,” he said. “The one thing that has been constant for months and months is Jesus.” Hot Jesus has so far demonstrated his staying power in the bowels of zombie-AI Facebook, Kubler said, by being a popular guy, and making money off of him doing virtual war with Satan. Remains. Amen.