Two interesting stories emerged over the past few days:
First, a new AI model called Suno v6 pro was released, which had some in tech claiming that “Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over… Suno v6 pro et al has solved infinite personalized music.”
Second, senior executives at Anthropic have been wining and dining religious leaders and trying to convince them that AI has a soul.
Pope Leo XIV responded with the following:
In this era of artificial intelligence, it is becoming urgent to distinguish human art from what machines produce. There is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity. For this reason, the Church wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions to safeguard our humanity."
I am neither Catholic nor particularly religious, but I could not agree more with the Pope. The pursuit of human craft, quality, and excellence has intrinsic value. It is essential to what makes life worth living. We must protect it.
A machine that scours the internet, rips off other people’s work, and then makes a statistical projection about what comes next is not an embodied being. It does not possess a nervous system that can have a felt, subjective experience any more than a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet can.
It could simply be that, as the writer Cal Newport has pointed out on multiple occasions, the leaders at Anthropic are part of a bizarre effective altruist/rationalist movement that believes they are tasked with heralding a digital godhead to either bring forth a utopia or end times.
Or perhaps Anthropic’s leaders are trying to convince you that AI has a soul to strengthen their argument that AI writing, AI art, AI music, AI sports, AI dating, AI sex, AI everything is the same as the human version. Although this worldview would help Anthropic’s bottom line, as the Pope wrote, it is also delusional.
Why Craft and Quality Matter in an Age of Slop
The whole point of music and art and sport and craft and love is that it’s filled with human heart and soul. The enter-a-prompt, press-a-button lifestyle removes texture, satisfaction, and fulfillment from life. A life of ease and immediacy is not the same as a good life.
We gain satisfaction and make meaning not from the result of our pursuits but from the process—from facing resistance, overcoming setbacks, and struggling to create something worthwhile. This shared experience is also what connects us as humans.
Music is a perfect example.
Real music is powerful because it transmits what someone else is feeling when they make it, and then you, the listener, feel something unique when you receive it. Music expands your horizons and opens your emotional aperture. This is the opposite of machine-generated “infinite personalized music.” Music, at least good music, is special because humans create it with care.
It’s the same with sports, art, relationships, or pretty much anything worthwhile in life. These pursuits take someone’s lived experience—the thoughts, feelings, highs, lows, heartbreaks—and turn it into something meaningful. To outsource this process to machines would be a tragedy. The quality of the finished product is diminished because the quality of what went into creating it is diminished.
In a recent piece for The Atlantic, Tyler Austin Harper wrote about how the fishing community is up in arms because anglers are increasingly posting AI-generated photos of catches.
“Angling, even extreme angling, is just a hobby, but although the stakes may be low, the anger about artificial fish is real,” writes Harper. “Partly, I think this is because of the work that being even remotely good at the sport demands. Striped bass move and feed in locally specific patterns that can take months or years to crack. There is a risk of drowning, and the mounting reports of bull sharks, tiger sharks, and great whites in the Northeast call attention to another layer of danger: We smell like fish, swim in dark water, and look like clumsy seals in our black neoprene. Wetsuiting does not change the world, but it is an activity that is hard and honest and, in that way, human.”
When I first read Harper’s piece, I immediately thought about doping in sport. The cost of doping in sport isn’t just what dopers rob from clean athletes in prize money. It’s what dopers rob from all of us. Whenever we see an extraordinary performance, our first response isn’t to behold it in awe, but rather to question if it’s even real.
We love sports not in spite of human limits but because of human limits. Look no further for proof than the total flop of the “Enhanced Games,” the steroid Olympics that were, perhaps unsurprisingly, funded and operated by many of the same people who are the biggest techno evangelists. People don’t care about the enhanced games because they know it’s not real. AI threatens to turn everything into the enhanced games, but worse. With doping in sport, at least you still need to train. With AI, you need only to click a button.
If AI actually gets as good as some people say, then we’ll be left with the enhanced games of everything. If AI doesn’t keep improving, then we’ll be left with the slopification of everything. The reality will probably be a domain-specific mix of both. This should offer no consolation, since both options are terrible.
Pillars of a Humanist Resistance
It’s not hard to imagine a world with much more AI and much less soul. The massive valuations of companies like Anthropic depend on us surrendering to this world. But it is not inevitable.
And so it is on us—people who care about craft, quality, and human excellence—to resist and hold the line. What this means will evolve, but here’s a starting point:
Do not outsource to AI anything that is core to your craft.
Do not replace meaningful struggle or meaningful effort with AI.
Be skeptical of grand proclamations from tech overlords.
Eschew AI-generated slop.
Celebrate and support human work.
AI is fine as an advanced version of Google search or as a way to clean up and analyze massive data sets. But the more AI encroaches on our essential humanness—our ability to exert effort, to struggle, to create, and to connect—the flatter our experience will be.
Much of the discussion surrounding AI has focused on the dangers of machines becoming more like humans, but I think there is a greater, and certainly more immediate danger of humans becoming more like machines. We’ll feel less. We’ll strive less. We’ll understand less. We’ll care less. We’ll love less.
Millions of people will go with the flow and follow the path of least resistance. Many will even welcome AI into every corner of their lives with open arms, like it’s the best thing that’s ever happened to them.
Fortunately, you don’t need to do this.
You can be the counterculture.
You can be ultra-human.
For more on human excellence in an age of AI, check out The Way of Excellence. This theme is at the heart of the book.
I agree wholeheartedly and appreciate you writing about AI. I’d go further with your first bullet point, “Do not outsource to AI anything that is core to your craft.” Beyond “core to your craft,” don’t use it at all in daily life except as necessary or required for your employment. Don’t treat it as a personal assistant to write emails, plan meals, create a travel itinerary, make a flyer, write an Instagram post, or any of the other things I hear my peers say they ask AI to do. That’s how the slippery slope starts and you stop thinking and creating on your own.
I appreciate reading your words here, and I do mean, *your* words. It matters.
I just finished a book by an author and personal friend I’ve long admired, and the book was unmistakably written/revised/edited by AI, which diminished my opinion of my friend tremendously. I absolutely believe the core material was true to his experiences and the lessons he pulled from it (nonfiction), but the essence of it, his words, his arguments, was not him. (Although it was clearly modeled on his voice and style.)
My opinion of his work is diminished which makes me sad. I’ve tried to press into what bothers me so much, but I haven’t wrestled the “why” down. (Perhaps I should ask Claude? lol) But I’m deeply troubled that someone I know to be a reflective person, with a long history of thinking and expressing his thoughts, would lean into AI to this extent.
The point you made about real music being made with care, I think, gets to my sorrow. Thank you.