Does AI Have a Soul? Wrong Question

A banana duct-taped to a wall sold for about six million dollars at Sotheby’s in 2024. It’s a piece by Maurizio Cattelan called “Comedian,” and the buyer ate the banana. I look at that and think, what the hell? It’s a banana and a strip of tape. Somebody else looked at the exact same object and saw something worth millions of dollars.

The banana didn’t change. The person looking at it did.

Keep that banana in mind, because the most common argument against AI writing is that it has no soul, and I think the argument is aimed at the wrong target. I’m keeping this narrow on purpose, to one question: can writing, art or anything else made with AI have a soul? Training data, jobs, disclosure, the flood of junk books and copyright are all real subjects, and they’re covered in other pieces on this site. They aren’t what I’m talking about here.

Does art have a soul?

No. A painting doesn’t have a soul, and neither does a book, a song or a dance routine. Being precise about the definition matters here, because sloppy definitions are why this argument goes in circles.

The mind behind the art has a soul. What comes out is the result of that soul, and the art bears its fingerprints: the choices, the details, the feeling. And there’s a second soul in the room that people forget about. The mind looking at the art has one too. That mind completes the work. Marcel Duchamp made the same point after he put a urinal in an exhibition in 1917. The artist doesn’t finish the creative act alone. The viewer does.

So the soul isn’t in the object at all. It lives in the connection, one soul on each end of the wire. The maker puts something in, the reader or viewer takes something out, and when both ends are alive, the work hits. When I look at the banana, my end of the wire is dead. For the man who paid millions, it was very much alive.

A Christian novelist made the opposite case in a post I read recently. AI output, he wrote, is a product of probabilities, not intent, so a passage that moved you might turn out to be random sentences strung together. He doesn’t care for Jackson Pollock’s paint-flinging for the same reason. I respect that as a line for his own books. But the probability argument only describes the machine working alone. When a person directs the work, keeps what’s right and throws out the rest, the intent is that person’s, the same as when a painter decides which drip stays on the canvas. And meaning was never only on the maker’s end. A reader in the same thread said that if he reads something and likes it, it has meaning to him. That’s the other end of the wire.

Watch: Scientists identify what it takes for AI to become conscious, Sabine Hossenfelder

How belly dance pulled me out of grief

When Claudia died, I eventually ran into belly dancers. I found the dance soothing to the mind. The colors, the motion, the beauty of it all helped me with the grief in a way nothing else did.

It wasn’t one thing. The choreography came from a human being. The dancers, women and sometimes men, had spent an outrageous amount of time learning to move like that. There was the place: a Renaissance faire, a Persian restaurant, an outdoor show. There was the weather, and there was how I felt that day. All of it came together into something that had an effect on my soul. There was a connection between souls, and it helped me at a time when I needed help badly.

Now compare that with robots. I watched Boston Dynamics put its robot dogs on America’s Got Talent, dancing in a routine in front of the judges. It was kind of interesting to watch, and the audience seemed to like it, but I think that was mostly because it was new. Nobody choreographed those dogs out of grief or joy. An engineer wrote a sequence, and the machines ran it.

I just went, eh, whatever. It didn’t matter to me at all. I knew it was a bunch of programs. There was no one on the other end of the wire.

The robots moved better than I ever will. It didn’t matter. Movement was never the point.

Novelty is a cheap thrill, and it wears off fast. The second time you watch robot dogs dance, you check your phone. I went back to dozens of belly dance shows a year, and the connection never wore thin.

Can AI create art equal to what a human soul creates?

My answer is no. AI can’t do it on its own.

I tried using AI for fiction once and got perfectly valid prose that totally lacked empathy, soul and life. AI does that when you hand it the wheel. At its best, it produces adequate work, maybe a little above adequate. At its worst, it produces a bazillion pieces of AI slop that flood the market.

The reason isn’t creativity, exactly. AI can shuffle ideas into combinations nobody tried before. The reason is that AI isn’t curious. It doesn’t go looking, and it never wonders what happened at the funeral, why the character would do that, or what the reader will feel on page two hundred. It answers when asked, and it never asks on its own. It has nothing at stake, nothing it wants to say and no reason to care whether you cry.

Is AI sentient? I don’t think so. Nobody can prove it either way yet, and it doesn’t change the answer. Whatever is or isn’t going on inside the machine, it isn’t the one that wants to scare you in a horror novel. A person wants that.

Where does the power come from when a human directs AI?

Put a human mind on top of the machine and everything changes.

Free the human from the grind of pen and paper or keyboard, and use the AI as an assistant to help form the work, and you have real power.

That help can look like anything: a draft, an outline, a sounding board for plot ideas. Help forming characters, testing pacing, catching a scene that drags. It’s the same job a hired assistant would do for an author who tells them exactly what to write. The AI isn’t creating the art. A human brain is directing it to create the art, and as long as the human is still doing the creative work, the soul is there.

Effort is beside the point. Judgment isn’t.

The human decides what the story is, what stays and what goes, what detail lands and what reads as a cliché, and what the reader should feel when they close the book. Those decisions are where the soul enters, whether the final words got typed by a person or drafted by a machine the person was steering.

Directing a machine well looks a lot like directing a talented assistant who’s never met you. Tell it what the scene is for, what the character wants and what the reader should feel when it ends. Throw away the first answer, because the first answer is the average of everything ever written. Swap the generic detail for the one only you know. Read the result out loud and ask whether it sounds like a person or a brochure.

If it sounds like a brochure, the human hasn’t finished his job yet.

Is AI just another camera?

I’ve taken more than 980,000 photographs. I became the unofficial court photographer for Southern California’s belly dance community, and for years I photographed the Rose Parade. That meant showing up at three in the morning in freezing temperatures with fingers that barely worked. One year I shot the whole parade through icy rain to catch the moment sunlight first hit a float.

The camera didn’t choose that moment. I did.

When photography was new, people said about it what they say about AI now. A machine made the picture, so it couldn’t be art. The poet Charles Baudelaire called photography art’s most mortal enemy in 1859. A camera can fire off frames all day, and every one of them comes out technically correct. Most of them are worthless. The one that matters is the one a person saw coming, waited for and caught.

Photography taught me to notice things: the tilt of someone’s head when they hear something they didn’t expect, the half-second pause before an answer they don’t want to give.

A camera doesn’t notice anything. Neither does AI.

The noticing is where the soul comes in, and it’s the human’s job whatever tool is in his hands.

How do you know if a book or show has a soul?

You judge it by what it does to the person on the receiving end. If it’s a horror novel, did it create horror? Did it make readers want to run and hide? If it’s fantasy, did they feel wonder? For any book, did readers feel embedded in the story? Did they feel engaged, feel good or bad about what happened, feel real emotion while they read?

Roger Zelazny’s Chronicles of Amber had a huge impact on me. The whole series, ten books starting with Nine Princes in Amber, and I’ve read it from beginning to end several times. I still love it. That’s Zelazny talking straight to me through the book, decades later, and his soul is all over it. Arthur C. Clarke’s Rendezvous with Rama does the same thing. You can feel it. Neither one reads like a hack churning out pages. I can’t say that about anything a machine has ever written on its own.

Television can do it too, and television shows something books can’t: you can watch the soul arrive, and you can watch it leave.

Which TV shows kept their soul to the end?

The first three seasons of The Expanse are a ten out of ten for me, easily. The authors of the novels put their heart and soul into those books, and you can tell. Then the people who put it on screen, the producers, the directors and the actors, played it like it was the defining work of their lives. The acting is superb. The story is superb. I can’t think of a single flaw except a few places where the ships don’t quite respect the speed of light, and I can ignore that.

Then the show moved from Syfy to Amazon, and for me the heart went out of it. Season four is unwatchable. Five and six are watchable, but they’re just story. The same people were still making it. The studio changed, and the studio holds the purse strings and sets the rules. When the money changes hands, the heart can walk out even with the same names in the credits.

Murderbot surprised me. I saw a few clips on YouTube, thought it looked okay, watched the first episode and was hooked. The Murderbot character hooked me, with its unreliable narration, and the crew is a goofy set of people with interesting beliefs who stay in the background and never preach. It isn’t as good as The Expanse, but it’s extremely well written. The characters make sense, the story makes sense and the plot makes sense. Two very different kinds of stories, and you can see the heart in both of them.

The Shield is the one that proves it can last to the final episode. Vic Mackey is the perfect antihero, a better one than Walter White in Breaking Bad. You should hate him. He does despicable things. But he has a certain heart, certain beliefs that make him endearing, and you never hate him all the way.

And The Shield stuck its ending. Most series lose their soul in the last season. Everybody knows the show is done, they’re collecting their final paychecks, and the ending sucks. The Shield kept its heart all the way through. I’ve watched interviews with that cast years after it went off the air, and you can tell they still love the show. Most of them would make a new one tomorrow.

Very few things in the world top the first four seasons of Game of Thrones. Which makes what happened next worse.

Game of Thrones and the soul that walked out

Game of Thrones is the best proof I know that an audience can feel a soul leave.

The show started slipping in season five. By season six the slide was accelerating, even with great moments like the Sept going up in green wildfire. Season seven was terrible. Season eight is unwatchable. I still haven’t been able to sit through all of it. It’s literally dark, filmed so dark you can’t see anything, and the battle at Winterfell against the dead is just stupid. Any general who fought that way deserves to die.

Look at what stayed the same.

Same actors, same sets, same costumes, same budget, same audience. The actors did their best with material that had been destroyed. What changed was the minds behind it. George R.R. Martin wrote an episode in each of the first four seasons, then stepped away to finish his books, and the show ran past the books entirely. The two showrunners signed a deal for a Star Wars trilogy before the final season even aired. They were still there, but they weren’t there. They had other plans.

By season eight, people were just doing their jobs. It looked like everyone knew they were headed for the unemployment line. The writers knew they were leaving, and they dropped the bomb on the way out.

And the audience felt it. We were on our end of the wire the whole time, and suddenly nobody was on theirs.

Millions of people who couldn’t define the word “soul” knew it was gone. It was a betrayal, a violation of something we’d given years of our lives to, and we were violated by it. The words were still on the page. The soul had walked out the door.

One show makes the whole argument. The soul was never in the sets or the scripts or the special effects. It was in the minds making it, and when those minds left, nothing else could hold the work together.

So does AI have a soul? Wrong question. Ask whether there’s a soul on each end of the wire. A book made by a person who cares, with whatever tools they choose, can reach a reader the way Zelazny reached me. A book the machine wrote alone, with nobody home on the making end, is a banana taped to a wall, and only the buyer can decide what it’s good for.

The companion piece, does human writing have a soul, goes into the little human parts that carry the maker’s fingerprints, and why AI writing is soulless covers what happens when nobody is steering. More is in the AI and Writing Hub, and if you want a book with your soul on every page, that’s the job my ghostwriting work is built for.

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