Could the AI Revolution Actually Save the Arts?

Everyone is talking about AI taking over the world. While I'm not entirely sure that AI won't someday spell doom for humankind, I have a more optimistic thought to offer: AI might in fact save the arts and humanities from the grips of postmodernism that have held them prisoner for so long, albeit in a tangential way. AI is forcing a secular, technologically driven world to consider: If AI could paint the Sistine Chapel better than Michelangelo, write poetry like Shelley and Keats, produce humor like Mark Twain, why shouldn't it? We understand, perhaps without fully knowing why, that AI cannot capture the human spirit like the Odyssey or the Iliad have; it cannot create a witty line that lives forever in the equivalence of Shakespeare; it cannot pose the daunting moral questions with the same rawness and darkness that Dostoevsky or Nietzsche do; artificial intelligence cannot tell us what we ought to make of Mozart or Beethoven. After all, the humanities are, well, the humanities, and we intuitively concede that there is a moral reason for art to be primarily, if not strictly, a human endeavor. We have begun to find ourselves at a reckoning with the telos of the humanities—a reckoning that could prove incredibly beneficial to a postmodern, secular society. Art is interesting in large part because humanity is poured into it, because humanity created it, and exudes from it. There is evidence of this reckoning happening in the creative echelons of society. There are a plethora of movements and examples of artists rejecting not only AI but technology and digitalization writ large. For instance, musicians have started promoting "phone-free" concerts, among them even megastar Harry Styles, who even gave out analog disposable cameras at one of his shows, urging folks to put down their phones and experience his show without smart tech. There are a plethora of social media groups and trending hashtags centered around the tagline "Artists Against AI." In August, Forbes ran an article about artists creating a site specifically designed to protect their work from AI scrapers. In the article, Forbes mentions that artists not only object to AI on the practical grounds that it could take their jobs, but that it poses a "basic affront to the ideals of art [emphasis added]." Forbes also ran an article just a few weeks ago about how the humanities degrees are primed for a comeback thanks to AI. Even in the midst of the AI revolution and all this talk of AI domination, it seems that there is an implicit understanding that the arts and humanities hold something that AI cannot and should not replicate. But it goes further. When an AI-generated artist (unbeknownst to most listeners) topped Christian gospel charts late last year, consider the headline of the New York Post article on the subject: "The No. 1 Christian artist topping the charts has no soul — thanks to AI [emphasis added]." As society tries to differentiate man from intelligence, it encounters the idea of the soul. And if something akin to the soul exists—if humans offer something intrinsically and inexplicably unique—then art is interesting in large part because humanity is poured into it, because humanity created it, and exudes from it. We find ourselves confronted with something like the Biblical dignity of man: unable to escape an inexplicable and transcendental notion of the soul in our reluctance to embrace AI-driven art. Just a few months ago, The Atlantic ran a piece on AI entitled "There Is Already a Word for the Deep Moral Failures of AI," and the byline went on, "It's sin." In the article , author Tyler Austin Harper writes that although he is uncomfortable with the word, he can find no description better than "sinful" for some of AI's more nefarious uses. He goes on to say, "Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised, then, that the critics, living and dead, who capture my unease about the AI revolution—who discuss it with appropriate moral gravity—are or were Christians . They are or were people comfortable using words like sin [emphasis added]." Praise, coming from a secular journalistic perspective, of the moral gravity that the Christian response brings to the AI revolution should kindle a kind of optimism surrounding all of the AI-will-take-over-the-world talk that is so deafening right now. If AI is leading secular journalists back to traditional notions of "sin" and moral failure, AI might serve as a wake-up call to a postmodern society that can't define human nature, with our capacity for both righteousness and sin, in any meaningful way. The irony, of course, is that this notion of the soul was once foundational to human artistic and intellectual endeavors. The liberal arts were contingent on a deep understanding of human nature and the human experience when it comes to things like morality, God, beauty, love, grief, and the unique purpose of mankind—all things which postmodernism distorted or dispelled via the introduction of moral relativism and atheism. Now recall the Atlantic, Forbes, and NY Post articles and the determination of the art and humanities communities to keep AI at bay. Who knew a secular society would start condemning the AI revolution for its "sins"? Using religious terminology and praising Christianity's moral skepticism when it comes to AI? Society is now back to appreciating why humanities degrees offer something that AI cannot, and we're back to talking about ideals and using dirty words like "sin." The soul, with its capacity for virtue and sin, is the only explanation for the kind of human dignity and morality that would prevent AI from commandeering the humanities, and now AI and the digital revolution writ large have sent modern society tiptoeing around the idea. We may find the age of AI to ironically be more of a human renaissance than anything else. Much like the pro-shop-local/small-business movement is still very much alive despite modern mass manufacturing and giants like Amazon, I don't think that AI will take over every crevice of human undertaking, because I don't think it can commandeer the liberal arts if we understand them correctly and discard our relativist postmodern lens. Our reluctance to AI taking over the arts has already been prompting us to acknowledge, or at least consider, the idea of the soul, bringing a postmodern society one step closer to returning to the traditional understanding of human nature and the importance of things like virtue. If that is one possible trajectory of AI—to propel us to new heights when it comes to scientific endeavors but to be deliberately expelled from certain human artistic endeavors in favor of the return to more fundamental understandings of sin and soul—then we may find the age of AI to ironically be more of a human renaissance than anything else. Too optimistic a take? Maybe. But hey, there's another thing that humans are uniquely and inexplicably good at: hope.