THE ART WITHIN THE MACHINE An Op-Ed Interview on AI, Human Creativity, Science and Spirit

By Rev. Paula Josephine Sadler

There is a strange conversation taking place in our culture.

We talk about artificial intelligence as though it somehow arrived from another planet.

We call something “AI-generated,” and sometimes the words are spoken as though no human creativity exists anywhere behind it.

But who created artificial intelligence?

Human beings did.

Scientists imagined it. Mathematicians gave it language. Engineers constructed it. Programmers wrote code. Researchers spent lifetimes asking questions that previous generations might have considered impossible.

That leads me to a question I believe deserves much more consideration:

Could science itself be an art?

And if innovation requires imagination, experimentation, intuition, failure, persistence and ultimately creation, isn't there artistry within invention itself?

These questions became particularly interesting to me after conversations about our use of AI at the Historic Commercial Center District in Las Vegas.

For nearly two decades, our grassroots organization has supported human artists, commissioned artwork, helped bring murals into the neighborhood, hired designers when resources permitted and worked to transform a struggling neighborhood through creativity.

And now we also use AI.

I don't see those things as contradictions.

I see them as chapters in the continuing story of human creativity.

So rather than simply arguing about whether AI-generated images constitute “art,” perhaps we should ask some larger questions.

Q: WHAT WOULD OUR WORLD LOOK LIKE IF THE PEOPLE WHO PIONEERED COMPUTING AND ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE HAD SIMPLY STOPPED?

Imagine telling the scientists of the 1950s:

Don't do it.

Don't investigate whether machines can reason.

Don't explore whether computers can understand language.

Don't build neural networks.

Don't investigate machine learning.

Don't attempt computer vision.

Don't build increasingly powerful processors.

Don't connect computers around the world.

Don't experiment with artificial intelligence.

Where would humanity be today?

This is, of course, a counterfactual question. We cannot scientifically know what an alternate history would have produced.

But look at what computing eventually helped make possible:

Modern communications.

Digital medical imaging and diagnostics.

Weather forecasting.

Satellite navigation.

Scientific modeling.

Space exploration.

Global information retrieval.

Accessibility technologies.

Digital preservation.

Instantaneous communication across continents.

Modern logistics.

Online education.

And eventually tools capable of helping ordinary people research, translate, brainstorm, write, code, analyze information and create images.

AI did not suddenly materialize when ChatGPT appeared.

It represents another branch of a technological tree humans have been growing for generations.

Q: WHO WERE SOME OF THE HUMAN BEINGS BEHIND THIS STORY?

The list is far too enormous to capture completely.

But some milestones deserve recognition.

In the 1950s, John McCarthy, Marvin Minsky, Nathaniel Rochester and Claude Shannon helped establish artificial intelligence as a formal area of inquiry through the Dartmouth project.

Allen Newell, Herbert Simon and Cliff Shaw were simultaneously exploring whether computers could perform forms of symbolic reasoning.

Over subsequent decades, thousands of scientists expanded neural networks, machine learning, natural-language processing, computer vision and related fields.

Then another remarkable milestone occurred in 2017.

Ashish Vaswani, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N. Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser and Illia Polosukhin introduced the Transformer architecture in Attention Is All You Need.

That architecture became foundational to the large language models that followed.

At OpenAI, people including Ilya Sutskever, Greg Brockman, Sam Altman, John Schulman, Wojciech Zaremba, Alec Radford and many others contributed to the organization, research and engineering that eventually produced the GPT family and conversational AI.

None of these people worked in a vacuum.

Behind every famous name are enormous communities of researchers, engineers, educators, data workers, designers, technicians and previous generations of scientists whose discoveries made the next discovery possible.

AI is artificial intelligence created through very real human intelligence.

To all of those people, known and unknown:

Thank you.

Thank you for imagining.

Thank you for experimenting.

Thank you for failing and trying again.

Thank you for asking questions that sounded impossible.

Thank you for your contribution to humanity.

Innovation itself can be an art.

Q: BUT HAS AI ACTUALLY HELPED PEOPLE?

Increasingly, research says that in particular tasks, yes.

A randomized experiment published in Science studied 453 college-educated professionals performing writing tasks. People given ChatGPT completed their work about 40% faster, while evaluators rated output quality about 18% higher. Interestingly, the benefits were larger among initially lower-performing participants.

Another large workplace study examined 5,179 customer-support agents. Access to a generative-AI assistant increased productivity approximately 14% on average, with substantially larger benefits for less experienced and lower-skilled workers. Researchers also found evidence of improved customer sentiment and employee retention.

And creativity presents an especially fascinating picture. Five experiments reported in Nature Human Behaviour found that people using ChatGPT produced ideas judged more creative than people using either no technology or conventional web search.

That matters to me.

Because one potential benefit of AI isn't replacing the person who already has every advantage.

It may be giving additional capabilities to the person who doesn't.

A tiny nonprofit.

A neighborhood association.

A beginning writer.

A small business.

Someone communicating in a second language.

Someone who cannot afford a research department, graphic-design department, communications staff and administrative team.

That doesn't eliminate professional expertise.

But it potentially changes who gets access to capabilities that once required substantial money.

Q: THEN WHAT ARE THE DANGERS?

This is where an intellectually honest conversation must resist becoming an advertisement for technology.

There are legitimate concerns.

AI can produce false information with extraordinary confidence.

There are unresolved controversies concerning copyright, attribution and the material used to train generative models.

Privacy matters.

Bias matters.

Misinformation and impersonation matter.

Environmental and energy costs matter.

Human dependence on machines matters.

And employment disruption matters.

The International Labour Organization's 2025 assessment estimates that approximately one in four workers worldwide works in an occupation with some degree of exposure to generative AI. Importantly, the ILO concludes that job transformation is presently more likely than wholesale job replacement, because many occupations still require substantial human input.

The IMF has similarly warned that AI could increase productivity while simultaneously increasing income and wealth inequality depending upon who captures the benefits and which workers are complemented or displaced.

There is even an intriguing creative paradox.

Some experiments find that AI increases an individual's creativity. Yet other research has found that groups of people using similar AI systems can produce ideas that become more similar to one another.

Imagine that.

AI could potentially help you become more creative while simultaneously making all of us sound a little more alike.

That is exactly the sort of contradiction worth studying.

Q: SO HAS AI DONE MORE GOOD THAN HARM?

I don't think science currently allows us to answer that question honestly with a universal scorecard.

AI is not one thing.

An algorithm detecting patterns in medical images is different from an image generator.

A language model helping someone understand a difficult document is different from a deepfake designed to deceive.

A researcher using AI to analyze thousands of records is different from someone using it to manufacture misinformation.

And we are still remarkably early in this experiment.

The strongest evidence currently demonstrates real benefits in particular applications and real risks in others.

So perhaps the better question isn't:

“Is AI good or bad?”

Perhaps it is:

“What are human beings going to do with it?”

Q: IS AI ART?

Perhaps we're asking the question too narrowly.

A generated picture may provoke legitimate debates about authorship, originality, training material and what qualifies as art.

Those conversations should continue.

But there is another kind of art involved here.

There is the art of invention.

The art of mathematics.

The art of engineering.

The art of asking a question no one has answered before.

The art of taking an idea that exists only within the imagination and finding a way to make it exist in the physical world.

A painter begins with an empty canvas.

A composer begins with silence.

An architect begins with empty space.

A scientist sometimes begins with an unanswered question.

Creation begins with something that does not yet exist.

Perhaps that is one place where art and science have always been relatives.

Q: IS THERE A “GHOST IN THE MACHINE”?

Science cannot answer a theological question simply because technology has become sophisticated.

A language model generating words is not scientific proof of consciousness, a soul or Spirit.

But technology can cause us to ask spiritual questions.

What is consciousness?

What makes a human being human?

What is creativity?

Where does inspiration come from?

Is intelligence the same thing as consciousness?

Is consciousness the same thing as soul?

Can something imitate understanding without experiencing understanding?

And perhaps the most spiritually provocative question of all:

When humanity creates something that reflects aspects of our own intelligence back toward us, what does that mirror reveal about us?

Science fiction has explored versions of these questions for decades—from stories about consciousness inside machines to films such as Ghost in the Shell and Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within.

Perhaps their enduring fascination isn't really about machines.

Perhaps it is about us.

Q: WHAT HAPPENS TO THE HUMAN ARTIST?

Hopefully, we don't discard them.

We need them.

We should commission murals.

We should buy paintings.

We should attend concerts.

We should hire photographers.

We should read books.

We should compensate designers.

We should protect human culture.

And when resources permit, organizations should continue employing human talent.

At Commercial Center, we have done exactly that.

But I also don't believe creativity must become something available only to organizations wealthy enough to employ entire departments.

A grassroots nonprofit using AI because it cannot afford a full-time designer is not necessarily declaring war on designers.

A small business using a writing assistant isn't necessarily declaring war on writers.

Sometimes technology simply gives a person another paintbrush.

And a paintbrush does not decide what deserves to be painted.

The human being still has to decide what they are trying to say.

THE QUESTION BEHIND ALL THE QUESTIONS

Maybe this discussion isn't ultimately about artificial intelligence.

Maybe it is about human intelligence.

Every technology reflects something about its creator.

Fire can warm a family or destroy a home.

A printing press can distribute poetry or propaganda.

A camera can document beauty or invade privacy.

The internet can connect humanity or spread hatred.

Technology magnifies possibilities.

And therefore technological advancement has always required something science alone cannot provide:

human values.

That may be where spirituality belongs in this conversation.

Not in pretending that a machine possesses a soul.

But in asking whether we remember ours while building it.

The scientists gave us extraordinary tools.

Engineers continue improving them.

Artists will challenge them.

Governments will wrestle with them.

Businesses will commercialize them.

Teachers will teach with them.

Criminals will misuse them.

Children will grow up knowing them as ordinary.

And humanity will ultimately decide what they become.

So perhaps the most important question isn't whether there is a spirit within the machine.

Perhaps it is:

WHAT SPIRIT WILL HUMANITY BRING TO THE MACHINE?

Rev. Paula Josephine Sadler

Part One of a proposed series exploring AI as art, science as creative expression, human innovation, ethics, consciousness and the spirituality of artificial intelligence.