Everywhere we turn, people seem to be using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to do something new. I’m not opposed to using AI, but we need to think carefully about how using AI might disrupt human society. While we might consider the potential for AI to replace human effort, we also need to consider how AI is allowing humans to engage in tasks that they might not be able to otherwise. AI challenges and expands human creativity, pushing us to reflect on how technology can both limit and liberate our creative potential. How might human creativity be extended beyond current limits through the use of AI?
AI reshapes human creativity in ways that challenge Christians to reexamine how creative acts reflect God’s reality. Telisha “Nikki” Jones’s recent use of Suno to create Xania Monet illustrates how AI is allowing humans to be creative in fresh ways. Xania Monet is an AI-generated persona and voice created by Jones to turn her poems into songs. According to Billboard, Monet became the “first known AI artist to earn enough radio airplay to debut on a Billboard radio chart.”
Jones used AI to create the music and persona. AI helped, but it didn’t create the music itself. AI-assisted, but Jones retained creative agency. Jones, a poet and songwriter, is obviously talented and creative. She has taken the time to figure out how to use the tools currently available to her (i.e., AI) and has, to some degree, mastered the process. Human creativity is on display even if it is masked by an AI-generated avatar.
So, what should we think about the new capabilities of AI? How might AI allow some whose creative talents were previously limited to flourish? Before addressing these questions, we must first establish a biblical and theological framework for understanding creativity. It is to this framework that we now turn.
Human Creativity
While it is common to suggest that human creativity is somehow related to God’s creation of the world, this connection can, at best, be inferred from the early chapters of Genesis. A clearer example of human creativity is found in God’s gifting of Bezalel with the skills needed to implement the plans God has given for the tabernacle (Exod 31:1–11; 35:30–35). God fills Bezalel with the “spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and craftsmanship” (31:3). Bezalel is to use his gifts to build the Tabernacle according to the pattern God has provided (31:11).
Bezalel’s creativity is constrained by God’s instruction. He is aligning the work produced via his God-given talents with God’s orders and God’s. Human effort and skill are brought to bear on the world, but not on human terms.
As we think about human creativity, we need to be careful not to think of creative endeavors apart from reality. To put it differently, our creative acts must fit within God’s order. One of the persistent concerns we should have about human creativity is its use in promoting stories that distort and deny God. While there may be other concerns, Christians cannot divorce human creativity from the constraints of God’s order.
This point becomes crucial when thinking about human creativity because it roots that creativity in a theological matrix. Truly creative acts are those that conform to the pattern of the world created by God, revealed in Jesus Christ, and illumined by the Holy Spirit. Decoupling human creativity from reality is not imaginative, but delusional.
Creativity and Reality
Framing human creativity within theological constraints may also offer fresh angles for reflecting on the use of technology in our creative endeavors. For instance, music industry insiders are concerned (rightly) about copyright and intellectual property. Some commentators (myself included) have noted the potential for us to set aside aspects of what it means to be human and to create more distance between us as we adopt various technologies. These and a host of other concerns are appropriate.
Yet, we should not ignore a more basic problem: when human creativity becomes unconstrained by divine reality—the reality of the Triune God—it can captivate both creators and consumers, distorting their vision of reality. Human creativity can thus distort reality and, in turn, the way we live in it.
Consider, for instance, the Xania Monet song, “Let Go, Let God.” The lyrics, as I understand them, were written by Telisha Jones—the human in the process. She writes, “You deserve peace, you deserve rest.” God gives us less than our iniquities deserve (Job 11:6; Ezra 9:13). Suggesting that we deserve more than we have is, at best, theologically imprecise. We have access to the peace which surpasses all understanding, but we don’t deserve it in the sense that we have somehow earned it (Matt 10:10; Lk 10:7; Acts 25:11; 1 Tim 5:18; Rev 16:6).
Critiquing the language of one line in the song may seem trivial. I don’t do it to condemn the song or the rest of the lyrics, but to highlight the tenuous nature of humanity’s creative endeavors and the ease with which our creative works can distort reality. If human creativity is to be bound by reality—by the criterion that what we create represents God and his order faithfully—we must be diligent to spot inconsistencies and to correct them. We need to do this humbly and gently, even as we do it firmly and boldly.
Creativity and Technology
So, how does the development of AI impact human creativity? First, it has the capacity to overshadow what we often think of as human creative endeavors. AI is, in and of itself, a feat of human creativity; however, it also has the capacity to make other human creative endeavors obsolete. This aspect is one of the primary worries of those involved in music, the arts, and writing.
Second, AI expands opportunity. We see this in the example of Xania Monet. Telisha Jones may not be a singer herself, but she can create vocals and music via AI. It is right to see AI vocalists as threats to traditional musicians because one of the barriers to entry into the music industry has been one’s ability to sing or play an instrument. AI now allows those without traditional musical skills to participate creatively, shifting the focus from performance to technological fluency.
Finally, technology is creating a new sort of distance between us and human creators. While it is true that we are experiencing Telisha Jones’s creativity when we listen to Xania Monet, we are a step removed from Jones herself. Apart from her interviews, she is relatively anonymous. Clearly, there is a façade created with almost any artist. We experience painters, for instance, through the medium of their artwork and less frequently in person. Even singers create personas that aren’t necessarily reflective of who they really are—the personas are part of the creative process. Still, with AI vocalists, we are stepping further away from an embodied human and replacing them with an avatar—a virtual stand-in instead of a real presence.
Technology isn’t doing away with human creativity, but it is changing it. We need to decide whether or not we like those changes. Do they subvert something essential about being made in God’s image, or do they expand the ways we experience one another for the better? Change isn’t necessarily good or bad, but it always involves loss. We give up what we had as we move on to something different. While there are aspects of a pre-AI age that we will want to hold on to, we should not assume that human creativity will go to zero because of AI.
There are a host of theological questions that need to be considered in evaluating AI and technology more generally. When we think about human creativity and the use of AI to produce music, art, literature, etc., my sense is that we need to consider why music, art, and literature have such significance in the first place. They are, at least in part, born out of human experience—the embedded and embodied lives of human beings. Enhancing human creative work via technology isn’t new, nor do I see it as particularly problematic (though the devil is always in the details). Replacing human effort altogether or allowing technology to keep us from experiencing the awkward, inconvenient, and inefficient activities that forge our character is another matter entirely.
Human creativity could certainly create a technology that diminishes the commercial and economic significance of other sorts of human creativity. In my estimation, the loss of commercial and economic significance is (perhaps) regrettable but livable. As Christians, we need to concern ourselves with the theological significance of human creativity, emphasizing the ongoing need for human effort in utilizing the gifts God has given us to point it and glorify him. Commercial success and economic viability can be helpful, but the theological aspect of human creativity can never be stamped out by economics or popular opinion alone. Christians can always preserve the space to be creative as we love God with all we are and have and love others as ourselves.
