Years ago, I was driving during the rush of the Christmas season listening to “Handel’s Hallelujah Chorus.” A spiritual feeling of truth moved within me, telling me God inspired the work. Tears came to my eyes, and I was grateful for such a revelation and could feel the divine power in the music. After that, I investigated Handel and found that moments after he wrote the chorus movement, a servant came into the room and startled him. “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself,” Handel told the man. Handel was also known to have said multiple times up until his old age that the music he composed did not come from him “but from Heaven.”
When we study the lives of other past great creators, we often find artists, writers, musicians, and others crediting God for their inspiration. Michelangelo authored a poem expressing his belief that God would grant him the ability to create a pleasing image of Christ. He gave forethought to what it meant to serve God with his gifts. Bach called to God from the onset of composing. When he started with a blank page, he frequently initialed the paper with the markings JJ (Jesu juva), meaning “Jesus help me.” Of Mozart’s compositions he once said, “I prayed to God for His mercy that all might go well, to His greater glory, and the symphony began.” The author Flannery O’Connor is a well-known example of a famous writer who prayed before writing. She expressed her reliance on God for inspiration and guidance. Not all these creatives professed to strong spiritual faith regarding their works, yet they acknowledged their inspiration came from God.
At a writers’ conference, I heard someone expressing her fear that creative writers will use AI instead of praying for inspiration and that literature will become dumbed-down with nothing fresh and inspiring. I don’t believe it will go to that extreme, but I do believe her concerns might be true in some cases. After all, how will one know what creative genius was missed if they asked AI instead of God? How far is humanity stepping away from God because of AI?
As an author who writes historical fiction based on true stories, I pray before I start each chapter. I write about real people and want to respect them as I tell their stories. In many instances, only God can tell me the right answers because there’s no way I could know otherwise. I also want to be at top form with creative prose and believe God can help with inspiration. Consequently, I have experienced information coming to me that I wouldn’t have known without the help of an all-knowing higher being.
I took a class in AI for writers and was greatly disappointed in the outcome. Although I learned how to make fantastic prompts for AI generators, the results for creative writing were lame and, at best, sappy and verbose. But I could see how nonfiction writers or writers on a fact-finding mission could benefit from AI because its narrations are based on learned patterns. However, AI can’t develop new and fresh ideas. It’s too predictive with no unique perspectives.
Uniqueness or original thought only comes from the human mind. The greatest of those creations can come from inspiration from God if we will but ask.
What would we have lost if Michelangelo had used AI to show him images of what he should paint on the Sistine Chapel ceiling? He was fascinated by the idea that God created Adam in His own image and is why he painted God’s finger touching the finger of Adam, to represent their identicalness and God bestowing the first spark of life. Those two fingers touching came from the creative mind of a human who looked to God for answers. What would’ve been lost had Handel, Bach, Mozart, O’Connor, and so many other creatives relied on AI instead of divine inspiration? What they created has spiritually touched and inspired millions. How much better is it than if we too turn to God in hopes of creating our own unique masterpieces?
