Would you sing a hymn written by a computer? I wonder how you would back up your answer to that question. I suspect the instinctive answer of many would be ‘no.’ But why not?
The answer cannot be because a computer won’t be good at it. AI technology probably became a better songwriter than you some years ago. I took the liberty of asking ChatGPT to write a hymn in the style of Charles Wesley about penguins:
In waters deep they dive with glee,
O’er ocean vast, so wild and free,
With every plunge and joyous leap,
They show God’s care for all who weep.
It’s a silly example, but here is a computer that has arguably grasped poetry better than many humans! And it’s not just lyrics. There are websites that can churn out a realistic 3-minute Christian song with only 20 seconds of thinking time. It would be possible for a hymnal to be published tomorrow entirely composed by AI.
Alternatively, you may take a more aesthetic approach and argue that an AI system can only rehash what has already come before and not truly ‘create.’ However, spend any time in any creative discipline and you will discover that the art of ‘borrowing’ is integral even to the great pillars of human artistry. As T.S. Eliot put it: ‘Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’
Instead, my objection lies elsewhere. We are dealing with what is known as generative AI, which looks at the prompt it has been given, or what it has generated so far, and uses statistics and probability to come up with what is most likely to come next. In other words, it is a specialist in manufacturing a statistically probable facsimile.
But that is very different from the efforts of a human being whose creative output is born not of statistical probability, but of a story: a transformative experience of the grace of God. In what sense could an AI truthfully say alongside Paul, ‘The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me’? (Galatians 2:20 NIV)
Now, in writing this, I do not wish to label myself as a Luddite. AI brings risk, but also opportunities. By and large, it can competently execute many of the finnicky tasks that we didn’t want to do anyway. But do we want to confine our congregational singing to that same category?
This, ultimately, will be our choice: a finely crafted computer-generated hymn that precisely satisfies the criteria of a good Christian hymn, or a hymn rich in the life stories that made it, a hymn that bears the marks of a life and community living for Jesus. Why settle merely for the computer?
