How Art Bots and AI Slop Will Rehumanize the Arts

This is episode 75 of the Renew the Arts Podcast. How Artbots and AI Slop will rehumanize the arts. Welcome to the Renew the Arts Podcast, where we discuss the role of art and creativity in the church and in the world.

I’m your host, Michael Minkoff. Our motto at Renew the Arts is liberate Christian creativity. Our mission is to cultivate Christian communities by inspiring art partnership and supporting artists.

If you’d like to join our community of monthly donors and contribute to this podcast, please visit renewthearts.org/donate. If you want to join the Porchlight Network and begin your journey as a partner in the arts, go to app.porchlight.art and sign up as a host or attendee. Last month, we discussed some general principles to think about concerning technology and AI.

In this episode, as promised, I want to focus on AI as it affects the arts. This is after all an arts podcast. And since AI generated images, video and music are becoming more and more of the norm, and even human interaction is becoming more and more overtaken by virtual protocols and chatbots.

It seems AI, specifically large language models or LLMs, are transforming the very heart of personal connectedness and culture creation. So, why do I believe this will not destroy, but will in fact help revitalize and rehumanize the arts? Well, before we can get to that, let’s discuss how AI actually works, and despite its appearances, what it actually is.

I recently had a number of realizations concerning AI while reading Ian McGilchrist’s extraordinary work, The Master and His Emissary, which I highly recommend. Ian McGilchrist is a British psychiatrist and philosopher who spent decades compiling and synthesizing neuroscientific research on the functioning of brain hemispheres. And you’ve probably heard of like left brain, right brain thinking, but McGilchrist’s understanding of hemispheric differences goes way far beyond pop psychology.

The Master and His Emissary begins by discussing the most fundamental difference between the hemispheres based on 20 years of his research. McGilchrist says that it is not what the hemispheres address. That differs as both hemispheres are at work in nearly all cognitive processes.

Instead, the difference lies in how they process the same incoming stimuli. He explains in broad terms that the left hemisphere processes selectively and has control or manipulation as its goal. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, again, in broad terms, processes concerning the whole and has connectedness and relationship as its goal.

In other words, to borrow from the old cliché, the right hemisphere sees the forest while the left hemisphere sees the trees. Though this distinction might seem quite simple and perhaps unremarkable, McGilchrist unfolds how these basic differences of approach account for a vast variety in the history of ideas, especially when cultures overbalance toward one hemisphere or the other. He also explains how the hemispheres should be working in concert with one another, and how the right hemisphere is most properly both the primary vision setter and the final assessor of any cognitive process.

He believes, therefore, that all cognitive processes should both begin and end in the right hemisphere. From the title of the book, McGilchrist argues, and I think quite convincingly, that the right hemisphere should be the master, and the left hemisphere should be its emissary. McGilchrist also ably argues that this hierarchy has been reversed in Western culture, and that the left-brainedness of scientism threatens to dismantle the very fundamental life of our culture and community.

Though the book does not discuss AI directly, as it was written before the current state of things started to take shape, McGilchrist predicts the direction our left-hemisphered culture would take. And while reading the book, I could not help but think that AI represents really the apex and the flower of left-brain culture. McGilchrist recounts some of the experiments done with patients who have had right hemisphere strokes or lesions, so their left hemisphere dominant or left hemisphere exclusive.

And he recounts their bizarre behavior and their inability to account for meaning or understanding. And it kept reminding me over and over of AI chatbots. Though seemingly smarter than anyone alive and having access to basically an infinite amount of information on the Internet, AI will still return sometimes hilariously stupid responses to even obvious questions.

One I saw recently that struck me this way was when AI chatbot was asked whether an upside down cup could be used as a drinking vessel. I don’t know if you’ve seen this one, but it’s pretty funny. With its smug, pre-programmed cheerfulness like they all have, it declared the cup useless.

Very firmly, by the way. And with no question, it said the cup was useless, as it was sealed on top and the contents would fall out the bottom. It concluded that the upside down cup must be a gag gift or prank since it can never be used as a drinking vessel.

And this is just a classic example of seeing only the trees and having no concept of the forest. And though in this example, a non-expert could detect the error quite easily, imagine how many confident confabulations AI will force on us that we won’t have the expertise to spot. And we will have that expertise less and less as AI removes our incentive to become experienced in the areas we delegate to it.

So it might even become a worse situation over time. It’s crucial to understand that AI cannot understand anything. It can mimic understanding, sometimes rather convincingly.

But even that simulation of understanding has to be programmed into it, and it has no capacity, like every human does, to see what it’s missing or to recognize the boundaries of its own limitations. AI processing happens in a complete, virtual, and self-contained world of explicit and definable parts. It has no access to a reality, a living reality beyond itself.

In other words, it has no access to a world beyond its own definite and explicit representation of reality. And like the left hemisphere on its own, which operates very similarly, no amount of telling it this is the case will ever make any difference at all. It simply cannot see beyond its own constructs, even to see that it cannot see beyond them.

So now, consider the arts. Miguel Cris writes a lot about the arts and particularly music in his book, because he believes art is the primary way humans have explored and shared the implicit and ambiguous aspects of reality as it exists beyond us. Our interaction with the reality beyond us, the unknown or the implicit, is the main province of the right hemisphere.

So the left hemisphere simply cannot understand, for instance, why poetry would be necessary if you can say what the poem means in propositional, undefinable terms. The left brain does not recognize that more than the proposition is conveyed or accomplished in a poem. And much of what is accomplished or conveyed is actually undefinable and unquantifiable, so you can’t even return that back to the left hemisphere.

It doesn’t get it. It renders poetry absolutely meaningless and irrelevant to the left hemisphere. So consequently, McGillchrist argues, our left brain culture has first misunderstood, then devalued, then either corrupted or dismissed the arts.

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I talked about this indirectly in the episode 69 on exploited art, that the true value of the arts is in the free metaphoric connection to the implicit ambiguities of reality, not in its utility to accomplish some explicit agenda of control or manipulation, which you can see already that there’s a sort of parallel there between the right brain and the left brain goals. Forcing artists to submit their art to an agenda destroys the very power of art to do what only it can do well. So it may be obvious to you at this point that the artistic way of seeing the world originates in the right hemisphere, though this primarily right-brained process obviously demands support from many indispensable technical and left-brained processes. 

Concerning this interplay, I wrote an article a few years ago titled, Has God Called You To Be An Artist? Where I made a distinction between artistry and artisanship between the vision and the craft of art. I made the claim that the visionary aspect of art involved primarily the concept or intuition or idea of the art, and that the craft aspect of art involved primarily the representation, the techniques, or the material manipulation.

I argued that both vision and craft were necessary in the cooperation to make good art, but they were distinct aspects of the artistic process. Now, because AI cannot actually accomplish anything but the crafty part of art and not even— it’s hard to say that it could even do that, you know, without imitation, which craft has more to it than just imitation. But for certain, AI cannot even come close to the visionary part of any artistic process.

It can only imitate that visionary part, and it can only imitate the artwork that has been fed into and programmed into it. So AI cannot produce meaningful art in any real sense, and the only meaning that it has or has access to will be granted by the audience. The audience will have to bring the meaning to its imitations, which are themselves lifeless and without any internal cohesion.

And this is going to create more or less a circular and diminishing effect of meaning even on its own terms, because the audience can’t really bring enough meaning. I mean, in the same way, like, you can bring meaning to a constellation, but that doesn’t mean that the constellation actually has meaning. And so as you get further and further into AI simulation, you’re going to have a loss of meaning, like a total loss of meaning in the arts, but also in other things as well.

But that’s especially detrimental to the arts, which originate in this right brain process of understanding the world beyond us through implicit and ambiguous means. Here’s where things get pretty interesting in my opinion, because in submission to a left brain culture, much Western art has already been subjected entirely to a hollowness of vision and to focus on reproducible and explicit formulas and agendas. You can see that this is the case from the fact that many commercial artists, maybe even most of them, have expressed great fear concerning the coming AI revolution.

You probably remember, it was just a couple of years ago, the Writers Guild strike that happened in 2023. Now, you may not know that the strike centered on protecting creative writing jobs from the encroachment of AI. It was actually very much centered on AI.

According to an article in The Guardian that talks about this, it says, one of the most closely watched aspects of negotiations was the use of artificial intelligence. Amid concerns from both writers and actors, that unchecked AI could dramatically reshape Hollywood and undermine their roles, pitting artists against robots in a battle over human creativity. That’s a little dramatic.

But consider this, though. No matter how good AI gets at creating imitations of art, it can only ever function derivatively, meaning that it can only imitate and reorganize art that has already existed and only on the basis of things that have been fed to it. Now, notice, most commercial art is already produced in exactly the same way, though not nearly as well or as cheaply as AI could do it.

I mean, the vast majority of new, quote-unquote, movies and television shows, if you can even call them that, merely rehash already successful franchises, genres, or tropes. I mean, it’s just cliché. If you’ve watched one hallmark or Marvel movie, you’ve basically seen most or all of them.

And the lack of enthusiasm, this is already produced in the viewing public even has a name, franchise fatigue. Most of us already feel it, and it’s only going to get worse. The situation in music is similar, has been for some time.

Most top 40 songs sound nearly identical to one another in any given trend. And this was already the case more than a decade ago, as evidenced by that viral video you may have seen, where it mashed together parts of six top 40 country songs into a seamless single track. I mean, it’s an abomination, but you should probably check it out.

Aside from some differences in key, the mashup works uncannily well. So the situation now, and especially with AI entering the picture, is even worse, and it’s definitely going to get even worse. We’ve already seen AI-generated praise and worship songs competing for top spots in streaming statistics. 

In November 2025, AI persona, total 100% AI artist Solomon Ray hit number one on the iTunes Christian and Gospel charts with the album Faithful Soul just 21 days after it was released. And it’s hard to detect much difference, honestly, between Solomon Ray and the countless other praise and worship artists creating nearly identical songs. Honestly, I think Solomon Ray’s music might actually be more original than the derivative stuff that it was competing with.

I mean, that’s one of the reasons why people are like, wow, what a breath of fresh air. Even though Solomon Ray doesn’t even have a soul and most certainly has never exercised either faith or faithfulness, but still Faithful Soul. Anyway, it makes a lot of sense that human content generators of such a collage of meaningless derivation would fear non-human generators of nearly identical pablum and sometimes superior pablum.

And it also makes sense that these same content generators, these human ones, are doing everything they can legally and otherwise to protect their jobs from the encroachments of computers, since computers could do their job better and more cheaply than they do it. Which is another way of saying that eventually, computers will be doing their jobs and ultimately, content creators will not be able to resist this. Indeed, they’re already embracing it to their own eventual obsolescence.

For instance, even in the writers’ strike, the issue was not that AI would be used at all. I mean, they weren’t saying, we’re not allowed to use AI and producers shouldn’t use AI. The issue was that writers wanted to be paid the same amount, whether AI was used or not.

Even if AI was used to do most or all of their jobs. In other words, they wanted to use AI to make their jobs way easier, but they didn’t want to be paid any less to produce the same or even more insipid copies of the copies they were already copying. So artists have apparently secured their guarantees against the economic encroachment of AI for now.

But if you think such guarantees will hold for long, I would direct you to consider the long history of unionization and the complete failure of all protectionist policies in the history of humankind. For example, there’s an obvious economic reason most American merchandise is made in China or Southeast Asia, where workers, sometimes children, can be exploited for cheap labor without the legal protections of unions or governments. And we’re still buying those goods for the same obvious economic reason that most abolitionists still wore cheap slave-made cotton clothes, even while they preached against slavery from their soap boxes.

So, though some American content creation labels may have their hands tied by copyright or labor laws or whatever from cashing in on the cheap and effective production of AI art knockoffs, I predict that a fairly large number of international or domestic players will be willing to let it happen, and they’ll be more than willing to reap the short-term profits. As soon as a few players start doing this, the consumer will eventually make sure that such cheap equivalents are universally available. I mean, Hollywood and Nashville will be helpless to stop this from happening.

And again, they are the ones who have insured that this will happen. By already cashing in on bottom-dollar derivative art, marketed to the lowest common denominator, and constantly and consistently lowering that denominator even further in a quest for the bottom. I have no idea how deeply insipid they could become before they stopped themselves.

And not only that, they are currently embracing the cost-cutting benefits of AI while they keep charging you the same amount for the cheaper content. I mean, according to a recent study, already 87% of music producers are using AI in at least one part of their workflows. 75% of film production executives say AI has helped decrease costs in at least one part of their production.

Are you seeing the savings? No, but they’re currently seeing the profits for now, and that simply can’t and won’t last. And as we discussed last episode, whatever we outsource to technology, we will eventually lose the capacity to do.

Already, this is already the case. We see that the fine art of visionary craftsmanship that had marked the greatest artists of past centuries has been degraded by the agendas of those who would exploit the arts merely for their economic, political, or social utility. AI is going to complete that process.

And I don’t even think that that process will take very long. But I will tell you, I don’t fear AI. I don’t.

I don’t think it will ever be able to make the art that needs to be made, because it has no access or even theoretical capacity to access any reality beyond the confines of its own derivative constructs. No matter how large you make that construct, it will always be a self-contained simulation. It literally cannot reach out beyond the explicit parameters of its defined and bounded program.

It can only imitate what a human artist does, and only after a human artist has already done it, and never with any understanding. Has that mattered in the short term? Not really, because as long as the consumer still consumes art as a commodity, the creator really doesn’t matter that much.

I mean, in the same way we do not consider the people who make our iPhones, we care little who makes the art objects we consume. If art is a commodity, we’re going to treat the creator of it like the creator of any other commodity, with indifference. And most consumers simply do not have the discernment to detect the difference between authentic art and its current counterfeits.

Again, a lot of them prefer Solomon Ray to other human praise and worship creators, many of whom were very insulted by the fact that a lot of people were getting on there and saying, this is the best thing. I mean, it was. It was number one, which is the consumer saying, this is the best thing I’ve heard in a while, and it wasn’t produced by a human being.

Hey, thank you so much for listening to the Renew the Arts Podcast. This time of year, lots of families begin to plan their road trips for the summer and fall. So we want to let you know about two festivals that are sure to have lots of folks from the Renew the Arts community, both of which are connected to our Art and Hospitality Network we call Porchlight. 

The first festival takes place on the 4th of July weekend in Urbana, Illinois. It’s called Audio Feed Festival. Porchlight is returning for a second year with its own line up, including Kevin Schlereth, Ballet 58, Traylon Eltsroth, Virtuous, and Zane Victory.

You’ll also get to catch a few other Porchlight artists that weekend on different stages including Boha Tribe, John Hayes, Matthew Clark, and Rusty Vining. You can get your ticket at audiofeedfestival.com/tickets.

The second festival we’d love to invite you to is brand new, and it’s our own. On October 23rd and 24th of this year, Renew the Arts will present Porchlight Festival, a gathering around art and music in Dayton, Tennessee, which is just north of Chattanooga. We can’t wait to share more about it with you, but in the meantime, please save the date, October 23rd and 24th, and keep an eye on our landing page at porchlight.art forward slash festival.

We will share this in our show notes along with the audio feed link. We hope to see you in person at both audio feed in July and porchlight festival in October.

So, with all that information, which is kind of like the last episode, probably sounds kind of depressing, why do I remain not merely unafraid, but even optimistic about the coming AI revolution of the arts? For a few main reasons, and we’ll go through these, and let me know, for instance, like if you are listening to these, and you don’t agree, or you think there are other things that might interact again, you know, you have your opportunity to send in your thoughts. I’d love to hear them.

So here’s my first reason. When art as a commodity is no longer as profitable, few people are going to make art as a commodity. Those who do will choose to outsource art as a commodity to AI, since the product will be the same, and AI will be able to produce it faster and more cheaply.

So those content generators will eventually become even more atrophied in all the processes of vision and craft necessary to produce, evaluate, and revise art. And this will also create an audience for artists who make their art, whether or not it’s profitable. Perhaps this is not an intuitive conclusion, so let me unpack it a little bit and use some historical examples.

Think about what happened when a division of labor, assembly lines, and mass manufacturing processes began to make furniture production, for instance, cheaper and more efficient. This actually did not destroy the market for handmade furniture. It actually more clearly defined that market and those who could or could not compete in it.

So if you could not make something more interesting, more lasting, or more artistic than what a factory could make, you would not be able to continue making furniture. If you made nearly the same thing a factory could make, but it took you longer to make it, you wouldn’t make a profit. The factory piece, which the consumer could not adequately distinguish from your piece, would be more desirable because it would cost less.

Now, on the other hand, if you could make better furniture, furniture that a factory simply could not make efficiently or cheaply, you would operate in a different market altogether. And as evidenced by the continued success of handmade furniture makers even to this day, even in a world where IKEA successfully exists and thrives, this means that there will always be a market for handcrafted commodities even. But distinct from a true commodity, consider further that art is not merely a crafted object.

Even crafted objects that are handmade will still have a market when robots are able to make them or when AI is able to produce them cheaply. They’ll still have a market. But again, art is not merely a crafted object.

The most central aspect of an artwork is the vision and discernment required in its conception. So let’s consider another example that touches our question more closely. Many visual artists working in the 1800s, mid to late 1800s, had to reckon with the advent of photography, which was a very disruptive technology that began to encroach on aspects of their craft.

Consider, why would anyone pay for a photorealistic painted portrait when a photograph would do a better job of serving that need more quickly and more cheaply than a painting? So, did portraiture or representative painting cease as an artistic endeavor? No, but it did have to adapt to do what it could do that photography really could not do.

Note that this coincided with the development of impressionism, expressionism, surrealism, abstract art, and other conceptual and vision-oriented visual art styles, and that they pretty much grew with the steady progress of the photographic revolution and because of the adoption of photography over time. So, visual artists had to explore and emphasize what made visual art unique and valuable on its own terms. And in some ways, the photography had removed part of what made it unique and valuable before photography, but it in some ways pushed visual art in the direction of determining its own purposes and its own values on its own terms.

And photography, rather than hampering that process, actually facilitated it. Now, I believe a similar process will occur because of AI concerning the arts. Just imagine that you’re a songwriter, a musician, or a producer after AI does to the music market what factories did to the furniture market.

Will you still chase the imitation of mass produce AI art? Like, why would you? It would be more expensive for you to make the same kind of music being made by AI, and you wouldn’t even be able to compete.

Instead, you would have to make things that AI could not make. In other words, you would not pursue art as anything other than a hobby unless you actually had a gift to make visionary or crafted art beyond what AI could ever reproduce. I cannot think, actually, of a single artist we work with through Renew the Arts who has anything to fear from AI for this reason.

Further, both the hosts and the artists on Porchlight have proven a willingness to discipline themselves toward the good, the true, and the right, before it has proved necessary. So they’re going to have, like we talked about last episode, a massive kingdom advantage if disciplined. In the sluggardly and despairing world, the adoption of AI will almost certainly produce.

And they’re already well positioned to pursue meaningfulness and patient and persevering human craft, something AI simply cannot do. As such, though they have seemed the least of these up until now, they may very well become leaders in the meaning-starved and desperate world to come. Now, there’s a second reason I’m hopeful concerning AI and the arts.

Without true artistry, to feed it, and by that I mean artistry that actually accesses that which is beyond our representations into the unknown and the implicit, AI will begin to derive only from its own creations, accelerating a spiral into a meaningless monotony that even the most undiscerning consumer will eventually grow tired of. Now, this is probably going to take longer to emerge than my first point. As at first, as I said, the art market, like the furniture market, will likely diverge into AI art and handcrafted art, with both markets becoming more and more distinct from one another over time.

But there is a difference here. Again, art actually isn’t a commodity, unlike furniture. And eventually, since AI must derive its productions from what is fed into it, much of its productions will become the reorganizations of its own productions.

AI is probably going to remove the incentive for the majority of human content generators from producing new material, because its adoption will also reduce the number of people who are able to produce new material, even if they had an incentive to do it. So it follows that more and more of what AI derives from will actually be produced by AI. And it’s going to become sort of an ouroboros consuming and reproducing itself more and more.

In fact, you may already be right now in the golden age of AI art, because as it does its work, and fewer human content generators are actually incentivized to produce work that’s fed into it, it’s going to be feeding more and more on itself and producing lamer and lamer reproductions of its own reproductions of its own reproductions. It’s going to get really bad. And consumers have already proven that they can experience franchise fatigue, as we said.

So think about how much worse that fatigue is going to come when AI drives harder and harder toward its own creative heat death without enough new material to keep its novel imitations interesting, like a dying battery that has exchanged its own juices too many times. Now, it’s possible that some human beings will descend with AI further and further into its morass of meaninglessness becoming like the denizens of Brave New World or Matrix like basically sedated by drugs and cheap entertainment in a virtual space. But I think the more likely scenario is that for very, very many people, maybe even the majority, an emphasized and almost exposed hunger for meaning might cause them to break with the virtual world altogether to rejoin the living and pursue the only meaning left in the world, the meaning offered by Jesus, the way, the truth, and the life.

This leads to my third and last point of hope, and I hope it does give you some comfort as well. And that is that AI will accelerate our already chronic deficit of meaning and social cohesion, creating a crisis for humanity, a choice, really a hard choice between either total reality. And I think AI will force this issue for us. 

We will not be able to hesitate like we have been able to between the two options and kind of pick and choose between them and try and figure out some sort of mediocre middle road. We will have to choose one or the other. And will we choose to embrace reality as God has given it, or will we descend into this hell of our own making, a hell of total and disconnected virtuality?

I’m hopeful for this crisis because I am confident in the plan of God for the good of the cosmos. I trust also in His love for humankind and His patient attendance to us. So I do believe the times coming will be hard, but I am confident in Jesus, and I am confident in His people, and I believe that His people will grow and multiply.

Most of you who are listening to this have already been doing things the hard way for the sake of your neighbors and for the love of God for quite some time. So I’m confident that you all have nothing to fear, for I believe truly the meek will indeed inherit the earth.

The Renew the Arts Podcast is a production of Renew the Arts, a 501c3 dedicated to cultivating Christian communities by inspiring arts partnership and supporting artists. If you’d like to find out more about our work, please visit renewthearts.org. The Renew the Arts Podcast is directed, produced, and hosted by Michael Minkoff, with oversight by Renew the Arts President and CEO, Katie Martin.

Production support provided by Chase Tremaine and Abby Sitterle. Edited by Chase Tremaine. Theme music by Civilized Creature.

For the 2026 season, we’re using the instrumental version of the single Think I’m Ready, used with the generous permission of the artist, Ryan Lane of Civilized Creature. Thank you all for listening.