This excerpt is part seven of our summer series, How Shall We Live in the Digital Age?—a collection of short pieces and excerpts from the June 2025 Ex Fonte, exploring how Christians can and should navigate the ever-changing digital landscape.

Dane Rich

Nervous, worried, disturbed—these are some of the emotions described by Christian artists I recently interviewed after watching some curated generative AI (genAI) content I sent them. The content was composed of images, videos, and music from models such as Gen-3 Alpha, Suni 4, and DALL-E. They described the abilities of genAI as “freaky” and “surprising,” even “bad for humanity.”

It is not surprising that artists would have such reactions to a technology that can produce music, paintings, poetry, and other creative content on command. Some of the artists mentioned using ChatGPT and other genAI tools to help create pitch decks or edit scripts. But there seems to be strong resistance to the idea that genAI is doing anything akin to “art.”

This resistance makes sense. Growing up, I used to hear people say things like “computers can’t paint a painting or write a poem.” In a way, we have used art to shore up confidence in our unique identity as humans. It is as if art has kept us ontologically above machines. But now, genAI threatens this bulwark.

Artists are now looking for new ways to clarify what makes “human art” stand apart from “AI art.” A recent article from Publishers Weekly defines “human art” as art “born from experience and inspiration.” According to the writer, “no software has lived life the way you have. No technology has supported a friend through an illness, lost a beloved pet, or fallen in love.”[1]

In other words, it is the human experience behind the artwork—defined primarily by emotionality—that gives it value.

The artists I interviewed had their own alternative suggestions. Some emphasized the value of the physical over the digital. Compton McMurry from Common Man—a singer-songwriter duo based out of Huntsville, AL—articulated it this way: “There’s something to the fact that human beings can make physical objects and hold them and play them so that they make music, and that’s just not even on the same plane as what is accomplished by AI.” Anna Friedrich, arts pastor at Church of the Cross in Boston and author of the poetry collection Under the Terebinth, said: “I see in myself a desire to hold onto things that could not be artificially reproduced. But it’s not just in myself, I see cultural longings there.” Others expressed skepticism that generative AI would ever replicate human cognition with the brain’s unique left-right brain orientation.

I wonder, however, if these attempts at defending human uniqueness are temporary band-aids to the larger problem of genAI. They will not endure, for instance, the technological advances in robotics that are setting the stage for a new kind of AI “embodied experiencing” or the improved can give because it is a completely unique gift found only in ourselves. Only by engaging with us can someone experience our gift of self. The creative act embodies its purpose not in static pieces of art, but as mediums through which we can gift ourselves to others.

I do not believe relationality should be used as a new band-aid against genAI’s encroachment on the artistic and human sphere. Rather, I want to emphasize that some things—such as relationships or art—are good and worthwhile for their own sake, whether genAI can replicate them or not. I worry that our existential anxiety around AI is pushing us to define human nature as “not AI,” where the essence of humanity is reduced to only those ways in which it is different from AI. Yet in defining human nature as “not AI,” we predicate humanity’s worth and dignity on AI’s existence. Defining humanity in this way does not do justice to our identity as imagers of God…

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[1]“The Irreplaceable Value of Human-Made Art” by Beth Spencer, Publisher’s Weekly, Sep 05, 2024.