I totally understand getting tired of the pro-AI hype… That’s why I started my “Back to School with GPT-5” article with “the good news for teachers deathly tired of the AI hype-train”!

I’m also a bit tired of the argument that “the genie is out of the bottle and we’re just going to have to learn to live with it”, but, unfortunately, we can’t simply dismiss this the same way because this argument is actually true—which is why these discussions are so important.

I mostly don’t look to AI to aid in the creative process, partly because I am wary of letting it into that sacred space. But I have found various technological tools to be helpful in that process in various ways: I composed the theme music I use for my Geek Orthodox podcast using loops in Apple’s Garage Band—without that technological aid, I simply do not have the skill or the developed talent to make music of that calibre. A friend of mine showed me how he has used ChatGPT to write lyrics for songs that he then put to music using Suno, thereby creating songs that deeply expressed the emotional experiences he was going through and which were thus immensely helpful to him. It seems to me that part of what we need to discern is how these new technologies can best be used, and in what ways they may become dangerous to us.

One problem that I think AI is highlighting in the creative space (in ways analogous to the problems that I see it highlighting in the educational space) is what you yourself note: the commodification of art. Making a living as an artist has long been a problem… I suspect it worked a bit better before the Romantic Era, when artists were seen more as artisans, but the problem goes all the way back to the beginning of art, I think, as well as all the way forward (showing up, for me, in my “What Is My Writing Worth?” post, here on Substack).

But art is ultimately not so much a commodity as it is communication. I am personally trying to move back to a model where people shared artwork (music, writing, drawings, etc.) with people they were in relationship with. This is what my granddad and his siblings did with their wiring and poetry. This is what you see happening in the piano recitals and poetry readings in Jane Austen’s novels and in Anne of Green Gables. This is not to say that great art can’t be a commodity of sorts, especially if it achieves world-wide provenance, but our exclusive economic focus on such commodities as commodities has devalued and driven out of the public space any lesser talents and artworks that may, in some ways, have at least equal value in terms of their impact in and through personal relationships.

AI may be useful in aiding and supplementing this foundational form of artwork, but, because such communication is primarily personal, it can never replace it.