In March of 2020, I was trying to finish my PhD while caring for a six-month-old and a two-year-old. Miraculously, I defended my dissertation that month in one of the first-ever virtual defenses at my institution, thanks in part to the availability of content. I limit screen time in our house, but I’m not an absolutist, and that month, I needed something that could hold my toddler’s attention. (A big thank you to Amazon’s If You Give a Mouse a Cookie series.)
Many parents will recognize my dilemma. With a pang of guilt, we turn on the TV to occupy our children’s attention, knowing that when we need to make dinner or talk to the pediatrician on the phone, our kids often need help passing the time. Even acknowledging this reality, we still worry (often appropriately) about how much iPad is too much for our elementary schoolers, and we fret over the time teens spend on TikTok and Snapchat.
Of course, screen time isn’t just a concern for kids. It’s an everybody issue, and we all know it, based on the language we use to describe our scrolling (“mindless”) or Netflix watching (“rotting”). As my toddler watched Moose bake muffins, the pandemic was changing adults’ relationship to content too. Stuck inside and socially isolated, many of us turned to streaming platforms and algorithms not only to engage with ideas, experience art, or unwind with loved ones but also simply to occupy ourselves. Grownups, too, needed color and sound to fill our quarantined days.
The entertainment industry responded to our demand. More podcasts launched during the first half of 2020 than in all of 2019. The number of streaming subscriptions worldwide surpassed 1 billion during the pandemic. Between October 2019 and August 2020, TikTok’s US user count jumped from 39 million to over 100 million.
Pre-2020, we were already watching Instagram clips and YouTube comedy shows. But five years ago, content started to imply something other than entertainment. I’m not the first person to point out how the meaning of the word has changed over the past decade. Content creator is now a recognizable label for a profession that involves simply making things to post on the internet. On social media, “content” can be an advertisement, a funny first-person monologue, a music video, or a Canva-generated text box with an inspirational quote. It’s a catchall for anything you might use to capture attention online.
In the world of content, process and form don’t matter. Any creator seeking views has every incentive to learn only one thing—how to attract and momentarily hold attention. On the consumer side, the term’s ubiquity has eroded our ability to distinguish between different art forms and modes of expression.
As a musicologist, I worry that the content ecosystem is distorting the public’s perception of the value of music. The late philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre wrote at length about human “practices” and the goods internal and external to them. He described the game of chess, for example, as a practice with internal goods (the logical puzzle, the learning process, the relationship with other players, the feel of a rook or knight in your palm) and external goods (winning competitions, becoming a world-famous player, securing prize money).
For an obscure singer-songwriter, the goods internal to making music are attainable simply by doing the making. These goods—the pleasure of hearing and producing different harmonies and timbres, the satisfaction of improving one’s skills on an instrument, or the connection with other musicians during a jam session—don’t rely on external acclaim, recognition, or economic reward. In fact, in MacIntyre’s framework, a musician who seeks primarily external goods isn’t a good musician.
Over the past century, technology has incrementally made it easier to separate consumable music from the process of music making itself. It’s easier to turn music into pure externalities, a straight shot of content. With a tap, you can generate a soundtrack for a video on TikTok or create a viral dance video. You can make an AI-generated Christmas song and hit the No. 1 spot on the iTunes Christian chart.
Not everyone thinks that’s a problem. When I wrote about the AI-generated soul singer Solomon Ray last month, I saw multiple variations of the same sentiment in the comments: If the music is good, who cares if it’s AI-generated?
But we can’t assume that something has value—internal or external—simply because it captures our attention. This will be obvious to parents who have had to think about whether to let their children watch shows like Cocomelon (at least one tech reporter has called AI video-generation platforms like Sora “Cocomelon for adults”). That cartoon may hold my baby’s attention. Does that make it good? No, but it does make it useful—useful to me, the parent who wants my child focused on something. Content is, above all, a tool of the attention economy.
Boosters of platforms like Suno, which generates AI music, are betting that our one-sided relationship with content is so entrenched that we won’t care if we’re listening to a song created by a program that steals, slices, and liquefies music made by human artists. To succeed, Suno needs a user base that does not value the goods internal to the process of music making—learning to creatively voice chords on a piano, figuring out how to play a guitar tuned in DADGAD, or collaborating with another singer. Earlier this year, Suno’s CEO admitted the platform is for people who don’t want to learn to play an instrument or even learn complex production software (and apparently, who don’t care that others learn either).
When we reduce our engagement with art to passive self-occupation, we treat ourselves like little machines that need to plug into a content-powered-battery for a little while. We think we’re getting what we need from a low-stakes Netflix drama or half an hour of scrolling through audio-visual miscellany, and we assume the provenance of what we’re watching doesn’t matter much, if at all. The proliferation of content has been so successful that we rarely think of our media intake as interaction with the creative output of other human beings.
There’s discussion to be had about the distinction (or whether there is one) between art and entertainment. Maybe we shouldn’t take our posture toward middlebrow television dramas so seriously. And what about Roland Barthes’s “Death of the Author”? It’s debatable how central the identity or intent of a creator ought to be to a reader, viewer, or listener.
But at the moment, I’m convinced it’s no less urgent to resist the creep of AI-generated “unserious” media. I don’t want an AI version of The Great British Baking Show as much as I don’t want AI-generated poetry and symphonies.
Whether I’m watching You’ve Got Mail for the 50th time or listening to Igor Stravinsky’s The Firebird, encountering human creativity helps me better know my neighbor—and it helps me know something about God. This is why I find AI Bible content both worthless and disturbing. I want to see and hear how another human being imagines or experiences the divine. Art that depicts biblical stories or figures has value not because of its accuracy but because it is a meeting point between Scripture and the human imagination. The artists are interpreters, illuminators. Their art is meaningful because it represents God’s willingness to reveal beauty, goodness, and truth on human terms.
Through human-generated art, whether in a painting by one person or a film created by thousands, I learn something about my world and the people in it. Human-made art makes my world more legible; AI-generated art makes it murkier.
It doesn’t matter if the neural networks present in AI models somehow reflect the human brain (anyway, philosophers like Mary Midgley argue that these comparisons are entirely invented and incorrectly frame human thought as a mechanized function). If we believe humans are imbued with a unique potential for transcendence, to receive revelation and then participate in creation, AI’s pastiche of output is worthless.
The pandemic and the years after gave us permission to be content seekers, to cultivate a relationship with media that is entirely self-serving, even self-anesthetizing. I’m not saying that contemplating art should always be hard or that it shouldn’t bring pleasure, but just as I hope my kids mature in their relationship with art as they get older, I’m resolving in 2026 to start rehabilitating my selfish relationship with content.
To start, I’m looking for ways to rehumanize the entertainment I interact with—to find an artistic version of “Buy local.” How can I do more to strengthen the communities and institutions in my city that support artists? The pandemic weakened already-shrinking local music scenes, but they are still there. Instead of abstaining from Spotify entirely, I can fill more of my listening time with music made by local musicians. I can show up to hear them play at small shows, cultivating an appreciation for the DIY.
If content in the attention economy is, above all, useful, I want to find ways to subtly resist that system by creating and enjoying art that is decidedly not useful but undeniably good. I do this every week when I sing with my congregation on Sunday morning—church is one of the few places where Americans regularly make music together. The church can be a place where we start to reacquaint ourselves with the varied cacophony of unpracticed human voices singing with confidence. If I know your unfiltered voice and you know mine, we might be less likely to be satisfied with a polished AI facsimile.
If we don’t check our comfort with content now, AI will consume our capacity to recognize the value in human creativity and practices. The CEOs of Suno and Sora are betting against human connection and collaboration. It’s time to start that garage band you’ve been daydreaming about.
Kelsey Kramer McGinnis is the worship correspondent for Christianity Today and the author of The Myth of Good Christian Parenting: How False Promises Betrayed a Generation of Evangelical Families.
