The artificial intelligence revolution is well underway. Along the cutting edge, tragically but predictably, is pornography produced through generative artificial intelligence.
AI porn is in its early days, but it is exploding in prevalence, popularity, and sophistication. As Christians, we need to consider where this might lead us.
At this stage, all the problems of “ordinary” pornography attend AI porn as well. It assaults the imago Dei by violating people’s autonomy, by treating them as objects for consumption, and by subjecting them to unwarranted shame and guilt.
Those most injured are generally girls and women and celebrities who are “undressed” through AI and cast in deepfake pornography, among other horrors.
One need no longer be filmed to be subjected to the degradation of revenge porn: AI can turn anyone into an unwilling porn actor in simulations that are “always available and can never die.” The problem has grown serious enough to prompt bipartisan legislation backed by First Lady Melania Trump and passed near unanimously by both houses of Congress.
Meanwhile, some companies like OpenAI are suggesting that the path to “ethical” porn goes through generative AI. If all porn were produced this way, the thought goes, no one would be harmed in making it. Porn users could get what they want without the human costs.
No Christian, so far as I can tell, has joined this chorus. Nevertheless, the allure of AI porn makes plain a largely ignored mechanism that makes pornography so devastating, whether AI-generated or not. Its consumption fuels and is fueled by pervasive violation of the tenth commandment: “You shall not covet” (Ex. 20:17, ESV throughout).
In particular, AI porn amplifies the reciprocal dynamic between the sin of covetousness and porn—because covetousness is a kind of fantasy. When we covet, we project ourselves into alternative worlds that revolve around our own desires.
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Augustine, in a homily on Matthew 5, cautions us not to “unfold the lap of covetousness, whereby you would at present possess the earth, to the exclusion even of your neighbour by whatever means; let no such imagination deceive you.” The earth is the Lord’s (Ps. 24:1), not our own, and what the Lord has given to our neighbor is in our neighbor’s trust. Covetousness rejects this order in favor of a world of our own making.
In this way, covetousness is the interaction between pride, which is a rejection of our rightful place in relation to God, and our own desires. “Pride is simply turning away from the immutable good [that is, God], and covetousness turning toward a transitory good,” Thomas Aquinas writes in On Evil. “And one sin is constituted by these two turnings … since every sin is a turning away from the immutable good and a turning toward a transitory good.”
As Aquinas implies, we rarely covet what we imagine is God’s immutably good life. The fantasy world of our covetousness is often the world that we imagine to be our transitory neighbor’s.
Your neighbor’s ox never tires. His donkey takes direction. Her home doesn’t have your home’s plumbing problems. His friends are more encouraging and generous. Her body never aches. His children are better behaved, more successful, smarter, and kinder.
The world we covet is a fantastical world. This is its appeal.
In his letter to the Roman church, Paul publicly wrestles with the relationship between law, sin, temptation, and freedom in Christ. In the middle of his letter, he confesses to the Roman Christians his sin of violating the tenth commandment when he writes,
Yet if it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin. For I would not have known what it is to covet if the law had not said, “You shall not covet.” But sin, seizing an opportunity through the commandment, produced in me all kinds of covetousness. (7:7–8)
In Exodus 20, the tenth commandment is accompanied by a prohibitive list (don’t covet our neighbor’s house, wife, male or female servant, ox or donkey) that culminates in a generalization: Do not covet anything that is your neighbor’s.
Paul’s comment about “all kinds of covetousness” in Romans 7 is thus key. Covetousness cannot be contained. It is a kind of toxin, a drop of which poisons the whole well.
When we covet seemingly benign things like our neighbor’s living room decor, our neighbor’s social media following, our neighbor’s car or vacation or phone, we invite covetousness to envelope other areas of life. Our sin is like Paul’s: When we give the fantasy of covetousness an inch, it takes the whole world.
This is especially true when it comes to the sexual realm. Fantasy lands are aggressively imperial, and they will overwhelm the borders of our sexuality. Pornography promises to be a place where everything goes your way, for your fulfillment. No matter your sexual fantasy, the lie goes, porn can deliver. And AI porn only makes this fantasy more tailored to individual proclivities.
In the throes of sexual fantasy, AI porn may appear to be stable ground, but it is a tempestuous sea driven by an embrace of a covetous way of life—a riptide that pulls us underwater and far from shore, into the sunless depths.
Sexual covetousness drives other forms of covetousness too. As we organize our sexuality more closely around our personal whims, tailored to our own desires, the rest of the world grows less enticing; less worth pursuing, engaging, and exploring; less worth loving. We recede all the more into the fantastical world of our increasingly covetous hearts.
The irony is that in this process, we lose what we love, and indeed what we need. Our real life becomes all the more dissatisfying, not only because it seems to pale next to our fantasies but also because it grows more distant from us. This makes the fantasy world of our covetous hearts still more enticing compared to the real. And so the cycle continues.
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Part of what it means to be the imago Dei is that we are embodied souls, psychosomatic entities whose bodies are intertwined with our spirits. The covetousness of pornography is dehumanizing because it encourages a disembodied view of life detached from real relationships.
Pornography therefore poses a profound spiritual problem that cannot be spliced from physical, emotional, and intellectual mechanisms. In the end, we become not only wretches but isolated, lonely wretches.
So while this problem is not merely spiritual, it is spiritual. Pornography shackles us within a place where God’s light no longer appeals. This is a fate worse than unmet desire, worse even than death. It is—literally—hell.
The fantasy world is ultimately a world of idolatry, where the idols one worships are one’s own sexual desires. This should come as no surprise, for as Paul explicitly tells the Colossians, covetousness is idolatry (3:5).
What one worships shapes one’s entire life. The first commandment—“You shall have no other gods before me”—flows into the other nine. But equally, the tenth flows back to the first, connecting covetousness back not only to idolatry but also to Sabbath, adultery, murder, and so on.
In On the Spirit and the Letter, Augustine writes that the apostle Paul in Romans 7 chose the tenth commandment “as a general maxim, and included everything in it. … For there is no sin which is not committed through desire.”
Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount similarly connects lust to adultery and hatred to murder. But what is lust except coveted adultery, and hatred except coveted murder? The turn into the heart represented in the tenth commandment can be read back through the other nine.
If covetousness is at the heart of sin, then its solution must be at the heart of our formation. The solution to covetousness—and our guard against AI porn—is simple to state but difficult to implement.
The solution is gratitude. To inhabit a fantasy is to reject God and his creation for a world of our making. Gratitude rejects this fantasy through both confession and repentance.
A grateful heart, in naming what it has received, is compelled by love to confess its past ingratitude and to turn anew toward God. Conscious gratitude, in other words, is the shape of ongoing confession and repentance from covetousness.
We must be grateful to God for our lives, relationships, and communities, for opportunities and dangers, for vocations and obligations and constraints, for the large and small gifts and kindnesses of everyday life and extraordinary experience.
Gratitude flows from being united with Christ through the indwelling of the Spirit. Thus united, we can begin to see our sexuality not through the haze of our fleshly desires but through the lens of the gospel.
The frustration of singleness can become an opportunity for Christ-honoring freedom (1 Cor. 7:1–7). A sexless marriage due to strife, illness, or age can be a season to grow in grace, to serve a suffering loved one, or to find new ways to love and be loved. In this way, gratitude becomes an expression of our trust in the will of God in a particular moment.
Paul understands this role of gratitude in putting covetousness to death when, at the end of Romans 7, he bursts into a hymn of hopeful woe, even praise: “Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord!” (vv. 24–25).
In the grateful embrace of this reality and all the other gifts God has given us, we are delivered from the trench of covetousness into God’s light. There, we find a world and a love that are real.
The fantasy world of covetousness—now made manifest through the potential of AI porn—promises to satisfy our shallow desires. But it fails us. We are left thirstier than ever.
The love of God is fantastical in the opposite sense. We may not get what we want in the moment, but we are guaranteed what we most deeply need forever. Indeed, we will receive far more than we can ask or imagine.
Timothy Pickavance is a professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology at Biola University and a ruling elder and scholar in residence at Redeemer Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach, California. He is the author of three books, most recently Knowledge for the Love of God: Why Your Heart Needs Your Mind, and publishes regularly on his Substack, Becoming Human.
