The Weak Answer
Being in LA has given me a lot of room to think about AI and art. When I talk to artists who are resistant to AI, I notice I tend to reach for a soft, likable answer.
"You don't have to use it for the artistic part. Just use it for your operations."
It sounds reasonable. It is also too conservative, and honestly, it is not the real answer. It concedes the premise that AI belongs nowhere near the creative core. That concession is wrong.
Tech Panic About Art Is As Old As Art
Every generation of creative tooling has triggered panic about the soul leaving art. The printing press. The camera. Recorded music. Sampling. Photoshop. Synths. Autotune. Digital painting. CGI. Imagine how threatened the oral-tradition poets felt when papyrus showed up. The panic is older than writing.
The pattern is consistent. New tool arrives. Incumbents claim the new tool will hollow out the craft. Some work made with the new tool does hollow out the craft. A small group of artists figures out what the new tool makes newly possible, and the form expands in a way the old tools could not reach. The rest is history.
AI is the current entry in that same lineage. The panic is not novel. The tool is.
The Real Fear, Named
If I had to distill what people are actually afraid of, it is this: AI will strip the soul from art.
That sentence sounds like a statement about AI. It is actually a statement about the artist.
Because soul does not come from the medium. Soul comes from the maker. Saying "AI will strip the soul out" quietly absolves the person holding the tool of the responsibility that has always been theirs. The responsibility to ensoul the art in the first place.
Every tool in history, including the pencil, can produce work with no soul in it. Every tool in history, including the diffusion model, can produce work with soul in it. The tool does not decide. You do.
Slop Has Always Existed
The word slop is genuinely useful, and it has been earning its keep lately. But the thing it names is not new.
Slop has always existed. We just did not pay close attention to it before, because before AI, slop looked like bad drawings and boring writing and forgettable music. It was easy to ignore. Now slop can look photoreal. The visual fidelity disguises the emptiness, which is exactly why we needed a new word for it.
The issue underneath is ancient. You can always make art that has no soul in it. The technology stack is not the variable. The artist is.
What Actually Makes Art Feel Artful
Soul. Authenticity. Expression that mirrors what is actually inside someone's interior. Work that risks something because a specific person made a specific choice that a committee or an average or a prompt would never arrive at on its own.
This is the same thing that separates heartshare from mindshare. The surface can be copied. The interior cannot. A machine can replicate your outputs. It cannot replicate the particular human who made them, or the reason they made them that way.
The friend on my mind while writing this is Alex Park, an excellent AI video producer in LA (and the person writing the book I would most want to read on AI for creativity). A few months ago he made a video that floored me. It had real soul. It was telling a story he genuinely needed to tell. He would not have been able to make it at the level he made it, on the timeline he made it, without AI. The tool was not the soul. Alex was the soul. The tool let him get more of his interior into the world than any previous stack would have allowed.
That is the pattern. Artists with soul plus new tools equals new forms that previously were impossible.
Two Imperatives For Artists Right Now
Ensoul the art. Do not hand the responsibility to the tool. Do not hand it to the model. Do not hand it to the algorithm. The ensouling is still your job. It was always your job. The tool only matters as much as what you put into it.
Experiment with the new tools anyway. The worst thing you can do is avoid AI out of fear that it will hollow your work. That fear is a projection. The artists who refuse to touch the tool are not protecting their soul. They are refusing to find out what their soul could do with more range.
This connects to how I think about the imagination economy. When execution gets cheap, the bottleneck shifts to who you are and what you actually want to say. Everything under the skin of the work becomes more important, not less. AI raises the ceiling on what soul can build. It does not lower the floor on what soul is.
It also connects to Art as Sybil Resistance from the FaithWalk side. In an age of infinite synthetic content, genuine human soul becomes the rarest and most valuable signal in circulation. Work that carries it will be treasured. Work that does not will be skipped, regardless of how it was made.
Your soul was always the variable. The tool is only the multiplier. If you ensoul the art, the new tools will amplify what was already yours. If you do not, no medium in history would have saved you.