I am in charge of sourcing songs for our church to sing when they gather on a Sunday. Not having a psalter, I have been looking for songs either based on the psalms or that put the psalms to music.
There are a number of good examples out there…and a number on the not-so-good side also.
But what I’ve also noticed is that there are an increasing number of channels on YouTube and Spotify that have passable songs that do not lead anywhere. What I mean is that there is no way to trace the writers back to real flesh and blood people.
I suspect they are AI.
I don’t want to use AI songs, but I have to ask myself: Why?
First, I don’t know the writers of almost all the songs we sing at Church. I don’t know their spiritual state, their theology, their qualifications. Why should it matter, then, if the writer is a computer program?
Second, the purpose of congregational singing is teaching, encouragement and praise, making music in our hearts. If a song is biblically accurate, encouraging and helps people make music in their hearts to God, why does it matter that AI wrote it?
I believe we will have little choice soon , anyway. Already people are using AI in their song-writing. Like photography overtaking realist painters, I suspect AI involvement in music is going to overtake purely human writing.
And other than a perhaps justifiable prejudice that I cannot explain, I honestly cannot think of a reason why congregations cannot use AI written songs.
Fascinating. I wouldn’t have thought there would be Christian congregational songs from AI yet. I can’t think of an explicit reason why it would be wrong, even if I agree with you that I don’t want to use them.
The ones I’ve seen in the wild aren’t marketed as such - the reason I was looking for the writers was to see if there was sheet music and what permissions were needed. There was nothing available. But if you want to generate your own, you can do that here: Worship Song Generator — Write & Demo Original Songs for Church | GoCrazyAI
I reject AI involvement in my spiritual life. I think that the risks of demonic involvement in these disembodied artificial intelligences are far too high to ignore. Although I use AI relatively heavily for practical concerns in my life, I don’t take spiritual advice or ask it for Biblical interpretation.
For those reasons I would reject an AI-written song. Say what you like about the man who wrote “It is Well with My Soul,” at least he was made in the image of God.
And honestly, do we need AI Christian music? Are we running out of sound Christian music?
I understand the concern about demonic influences. I am fond of referring to AI as psychopathic and I have no problem believing evil can and has hijacked AI at times.
However, I do not believe it is the rule of thumb.
Instead, it is a tool that has biases, makes mistakes and can be manipulated (and manipulate) to operate from a different agenda than the one we have. In these ways AI is similar to people, and so we need to judge the words and music produced by AI just like we need to judge people’s words and music.
Heck, even where evil spirits operate through AI, we need to be aware that they can be operating through people, too!
It’s not a matter of whether we are running out of sound Christian music, it’s a matter of how Christians will make a new song (Psalm 96). It will be with drums and lyre and cymbals and guitars and keyboards and mixing decks and loops and AI. And as with every new technological advance there will be gains and losses.
If you look back in the posts here on Sanityville, you will see I’ve brought up the idea of the image of God and AI before. In terms of creativity (and in many other ways) AI is made in the image of man, and if it’s made in the image of man it can serve man by creating Christian songs for men to use.
It sounds like I am an advocate. I’m not really. I still have my prejudice against AI music. But I suspect as time goes on everyone’s reservations will dwindle and this tool will be used as commonly as any other.