A Few Thoughts on AI and Christian Creative Work
Shortcuts in the creative process shatter the prisms of our creativity.
If you’re familiar with my writing, you’ll be unsurprised to know that the last year or so I’ve been personally wrestling with the role of generative artificial intelligence in creative life, specifically for Christians.
I have had the opportunity to have a number of constructive conversations with people on the subject, and I’ve read plenty from a wide range of voices, too.
I am far from an expert, and you won’t likely see me write or talk much about generative AI beyond something short like this. But after what felt like a bit of a lull in interest over the summer regarding generative AI, I’ve had a lot more conversations about it recently. I’ve seen a lot more people using it than ever before.
I’ve held off writing anything about this for a while because of the disorganization and conflict within my own brain on how Christian creatives should incorporate or avoid generative AI in their creative work.
When I sat down to write this, I intended for it to be a short paragraph at the beginning of a “Three Recs” email recommending some new music and such. I shortly discovered I had more to say on this topic than I thought. So, bear with me as I work out some of my own thoughts on this subject before your very eyes.
The purpose of all of this isn’t to pass judgment on anyone or anything like that, but to work out some of my own thoughts in public in hopes that maybe they’re helpful for anyone reading.
The Best, Brief Thought I’ve Read on Generative AI
A couple of weeks ago I came across a screenshot of a post from Bluesky that someone posted to Twitter, and it is probably the best encapsulation of my default posture toward a lot of generative AI content I’ve seen out and about.
Here’s the thing:
Yeah. I definitely feel that, especially as it pertains to using generative AI for any written material. If someone can’t be bothered to actually write what they want me to read, why should I bother reading it?
Perhaps an appropriate response would be to copy/paste the material written by AI and ask ChatGPT to summarize it in a sentence for me. That way I would only have to spend as much time reading as the person spent writing a prompt for the tool to use for “inspiration.”
You may read this and think I’m just going to hammer generative AI this whole time. I’m not, I promise. But my default posture is definitely more guarded than it is opportunistic, and the quote above captures that feeling.
General Ambivalence
As already stated, I’m still trying to figure out how to organize my thoughts about the relationship between generative AI and creative work, specifically for the Christian who sees creative expression as a means of imaging our Creator God.
I’ve never really been totally in favor of using generative AI, nor have I ever been totally against it.
I find myself saying, “Yeah that seems like a sensible way to use generative AI,” about some use cases, and saying, “Oh man that feels really slimy,” about others. And the lines between those two reactions feel rather messily drawn.
In book cover design, for instance, it seems to me that using generative AI to brainstorm book cover ideas makes a lot of sense. But using generative AI to create a full book cover feels like a breach of creative integrity.
Likewise, a writer using generative AI to help create an article outline from a bunch of jumbled thoughts feels like an acceptable way to use the tool. But using generative AI to actually write content feels like a bridge too far.
Are these thoughts inconsistent with one another? Maybe! I don’t know. I’m not an expert in this stuff, and I don’t claim to be. I am ambivalent. Sometimes I feel strong negative feelings about the use of generative AI—this is my most common response—yet other times I feel neutral about its use. I should say I have almost never thought, “Wow! What an impressive use of generative AI!” at least in the creative space. Even the somewhat impressive AI-generated videos I’ve seen usually end up having some goofy quirks that taint the content in one way or another.
My Personal Use
The most in-depth personal creative experience I have with generative AI came recently. I was working on a fiction project in which a character needed to die in a very particular way from a medical emergency, but also stay alive for a period of time whilst dying.
I am not a doctor, and I don’t know what level of function people maintain over the course of days as their body slowly shuts down. But I needed to know for the sake of the project. So instead of Googling around and trying to find what kind of diseases or conditions fit my plot, I was able to interface with ChatGPT and ask all kinds of questions about diseases and the guardrails I have in my story to discern what kind of medical conditions would fit my plot needs. Within an hour I had a perfect candidate for what would kill my character but keep him alive long enough for his portion of the plot to advance.
This was very useful and likely saved me hours of Googling and reading various webpages to try to puzzle together the same information.
While this use of ChatGPT was within the realm of a creative project—writing a novel—I wasn’t asking the AI tool to do creative work for me. I was asking it to act as a research assistant, fetching a variety of background details that would inform how I did the creative work I set out to do, not do the actual creative work of writing the novel.
I think those uses of generative AI are quite different. But perhaps I’m biased, blinded by my own utilitarian justifications for asking ChatGPT for help instead of Google!
Regardless of my own experience with generative AI in creative work or my general ambivalence about that category of tools, I actually have a sort of spiritual problem with how we use generative AI in creative work as followers of Jesus.
Shortcuts Shatter Prisms
As a Christian person who does creative work, I think it’s important for me to recognize the responsibility I have in my creativity to image God in my work. What does that practically mean? I think it means that my creativity should be flavored with notes of Yahweh and his character.
It means that if I make music my songs don’t need to be “worship music” that a church may sing on Sundays, but they shouldn’t denigrate people or promote destruction.
It means that if I write fiction my stories don’t need to have metaphors of Jesus around every corner, but they should perhaps contain themes like redemption, unconditional love, and advocacy for the weak and vulnerable.
It means that if I design graphics my art doesn’t need to only be used by ministries or churches, but it should be done in such a way that exhibits a kind of integrity and effort that points my clients to the God I ultimately serve.
Often we talk about “reflecting” the image of God in our lives—this is perhaps the most common verb that is used to depict what it means to live in such a way that people get a peek at who God is and what he is like. It’s a fine verb, “reflecting,” but I think a similar one would be better.
When Christians do creative work, we don’t reflect the image of God to the world as if we are making our art in front of a mirror for an audience of ourselves, but backward.
When Christians do creative work we refract the image of God. The image in us shoots out through a prism of lived experience, artistic talent, and cultural context and into a world who desperately needs the light we carry.
The pure light of God’s image we bear fires itself through the sin-fogged creative prism of each person in a different way, capturing a diversity of hues and dispersing the light across a spectrum of beauty for the world to see his fullness and glorify him.
Shortcuts in the creative process shatter the prisms of our creativity.
Whether through plagiarism, stolen visual assets, or AI-manufactured manuscripts, when we decide we would rather let someone or something else do the work of creativity we rob the world of the unique refractions of God’s image in us and our work.
This is, I think, at the foundation of why my default posture toward generative AI in creative work is more guarded than opportunistic, even if I do think there may be some utility to it.
The Product and the Process
One final thought.
When we shortcut the creative process, we make the exclusive telos—the aim or purpose—of creative work the finished product and not the act of creating itself, when really, the telos should be both of those.
Of course in creativity both the product and the process are important. A graphic designer’s client needs that YouTube thumbnail by end-of-day regardless of how enriching the creative process is for the graphic designer. The novelist needs to hit her manuscript deadline to ensure the publisher can meet its goals regardless of how much she would rather just watch Netflix and not write tonight.
But when we shortcut the creative process we turn creative work into a means of providing a product for consumption rather than a means of cultivating human expression and refracting the image of God on the road to producing a piece of art that will lead people to know and perhaps even worship the Creator God of the universe.
May God guard our hearts against an unfounded lust for creative productivity that prevents people from seeing the full spectrum of his image in the creative processes of his people.
As a graphic designer for about 30 years. I’ve been wrestling with this as well and generally with relief that I’m at the end of my career and can bow out soon.
There is a reason I’ve never called myself a graphic ARTIST- it’s because the creative work I do for clients is not my creative expression but is for the purpose of helping someone else sell a product or service. AI is now just another tool allowing that work to happen faster. I don’t like it but I think there’s no going back. There’s no way for designers to compete, and that began when apps like Canva took over and consequently desensitized the general public to good design.
If there is a positive about generative AI, I wonder if it’s that it will separate consumer focused art from true creative expression. Not that creative content shouldn’t be sold, but there’s a difference in creating something expressly to sell. In that case it’s just about giving people what you think they want. There’s definitely a place for that but it’s not in the same category as an inspired work that sells. I am concerned with how few seem to do art just as a hobby anymore, there is always a primary motive of making money.
It’s my hope that eventually people will start craving art again for arts sake - art with a true human connection.