Ted Gioia, in his superb Substack “The Honest Broker,” recently verified one of the most disturbing trends in technology today: the way the presence of AI-created art and images is destroying our access to human-made art and images. Google Images, Gioia finds, has started prioritizing AI-created “portraits” of famous individuals even when human-made portraits exist and are readily available. In addition, as AI-created content floods the internet, these systems use that content in its own training, which leads to AI-model degradation and eventual collapse. We are perched on the brink of a bottomless pit of AI-created dreck devolving into nonsense at best (Eldritch Horror at worst), and the ground beneath us is crumbling.
The lesson here is simple: When we delegate human activities to machines, we stand to lose as much as we gain. Sometimes the exchange is worth it; but as we are learning at a nightmarishly accelerated pace, sometimes we stand to lose much more than an aesthetic.
For those of us watching the rise of AI with dismay and an increasing sense of helplessness, the work of 20th-century Welsh poet and painter David Jones is a deep well of wisdom. Jones, a veteran of the First World War, had a lifelong concern with the encroachment of technology upon human existence. From the machine-made brutalities of the trenches to the machine-supported banality of midcentury daily life, Jones feared that, in our quest to control nature through technology, humanity ran the risk of losing our own nature along the way. His work, rarely comforting, often bewildering, proposes a spiritual posture we can take toward technology, one that upholds the truth about human nature and our identity as “man the maker,” the imago Dei, and the role God graciously allows us to play in the salvation of the world.
Making: A Divine Inheritance
“Technology” is a tricky term. Over millennia it has accrued meanings like geologic layers; what meant “arts” to the ancient Greeks came to mean “science and machinery” in the 19th century, and by the mid-20th century, “tech” stood apart from “art,” a data-based means of ordering reality. Today, with the advent of AI, “art” and “technology” are once again intersecting—but in a very different way. Whereas technology used to refer to a human’s systematic understanding of an art or craft, today “tech” refers to the manipulation of information—ideally with minimal interference from a human.
David Jones, from his vantage point as an artist in the 20th century, watched this shift with increasing dismay. His objections to the intrusions of technology into human creative life came from his convictions as an artist, certainly, but also from his theological convictions; Jones was a Catholic convert who developed an intricate understanding of the role humanity’s creative work played in creation itself.
In the essay “Art and Sacrament,” Jones asserts that mankind’s essential activity is not work, not production, but making—and specifically, making art. He calls art “man’s natural activity.” Art, he says, “is the sole intransitive activity of man,” meaning that art is the only activity in which humanity acts solely for the sake of the thing—a thing that has its being in the maker himself. In other words, art, the act of making, allows mankind to participate in existence, to declare his own being, in a unique and essentially human way. The human thing, according to Jones, is to make beautiful things—to make art.
To readers of J.R.R. Tolkien, Jones’ work may sound familiar, echoing Tolkien’s idea of “sub-creation.” But Jones goes even further than Tolkien, for he insists that making is not merely one way in which humanity manifests the imago Dei; rather, for Jones, it is the way.
Now, Jones has a very particular understanding of what “art” entails. In the “Preface to The Anathemata,” he does not limit the word to “the fine arts”; rather, quoting James Joyce, he writes that “practical life or ‘art’ … comprehends all our activities from boat-building to poetry.” In “Art and Sacrament,” Jones closes the loop, explaining that what elevates mere fabrication to the level of art is this intransitivity combined with “gratuitousness”: craft that indulges in making for its own sake.
Jones points out that examples of “meticulous perfection and beauty” are plentiful in nature. Bees make combs of exquisite precision and delicacy; beavers regularly manufacture structures of incredible efficiency and strength. But none of these, he argues, rises to the level of art, because they lack these elements of intransitivity and gratuitousness. Every element of animalistic making has a function, fulfills a practical purpose. There are no baroque flourishes, no Art Nouveau curlicues—even the mysteriously intricate underwater crop circles created by pufferfish serve the very clear purpose of attracting a mate. Only humanity makes beautiful things simply for the sake of beauty. We do this, Jones says, because we participate in the image of God. Beauty, in other words, is our divine inheritance.
For Jones, this has profound political applications as well. In the essay “Art and Democracy,” Jones explains that this inheritance of beauty-making is the equalizing element in humanity. “Men are equal,” he writes, “in the sense that they are all equally judged to be men because all behave as artists. … The more man behaves as an artist and the more the artist in man determines the whole shape of his behavior, so much the more is he Man.”
Machine the Maker
So what does all this mean for technology? Jones was deeply concerned about this point. He witnessed the dehumanizing brutality of technology on the battlefields of World War I, but that was not the border of his concern. He also lamented the collapse of basic craftsmanship as mass production and manufacturing took over the production of almost all goods. This coup of the machines, Jones believed, was not merely about “convenience” or “efficiency”; rather, it represented a surrender of that which makes us truly human: our capacity to make.
“Well,” someone might argue at this point, “so what if machines are making spoons? Doesn’t that just free us up to make more beautiful spoons on our own, since we don’t have to worry about making all the spoons?” The problem with this argument is that, at least since the Fall, making has been motivated at least in part by need. Remove the need and all too often we lose the motivation to make.
It’s almost as if God, seeing that outside the Garden we were in danger of losing sight of our very identity as imago Dei, allowed need to push us into making things—so that we would have the chance to be moved to make art. We see this very movement at work in the artifacts recovered from ancient tombs: axes, pots, staffs—the very practical stuff that allowed groups to survive—are richly decorated and intricately wrought. By God’s grace, necessity and beauty can exist side-by-side in our making.
Think about this: Since we started making machines to make most of our things, has humanity witnessed a great flourishing of art and beauty? Or has the built world become narrowed and uglier, and have our own abilities to create beautiful things become diminished? If there is any doubt on this question, try picking up a knife and piece of wood and whittling a spoon. Then consider that, just a hundred years ago, the ability to whittle a spoon that was not only useable but attractive was fairly common, and the ability to whittle a spoon that was exquisite was treasured. Today both these skills are rare, on the way to being lost entirely—and, even worse, people simply don’t care.
The reality is that surrendering making to machines has a cost. Sometimes that cost might be worth it; for example, it is a wonderful thing that most people have warm clothing to wear in the winter. But nothing comes free. With the rise of machine-made clothing, people no longer care deeply about their garments. They no longer learn the skills to repair clothing; they no longer value making their own beautiful garments that fit nicely. The toll on creation is immense, as dumps fill up with cheap, unsustainable clothing. But the toll on humanity is immense as well, if unseen; we are no longer connected to the process of clothing ourselves. We have surrendered a human activity, one that for millennia underscored our dignity and our identity as artists, as makers, to machines.
As Jones points out in “Art and Democracy,” this surrender has profound political implications. It is in our identity as makers that we find true equality; the more we give up that identity, the more humanity divides itself into unequal camps, camps that I summarize as “those who control the machine-the-makers” and “those who depend on the machine-the-makers.” This might sound like Marx’s division between the workers and the capitalists, but it goes much deeper than simply an economic divide. What Jones recognizes—as Marx did not—is that the poverty we face here is not an economic but a spiritual one, and those who control the machines are as spiritually impoverished as those who depend on the machines, because both groups have surrendered their human right to create.
The Return of Wonder
With the rise of AI and the imminent loss of all arts, even the fine arts, to the machines, Jones’ warnings are chilling. Right now, humans are seriously considering ceding not only the manufacture of useful objects to machines but also the creation of art, music, poetry, and film. We are on the brink of trading the last remaining scrapes of our birthright in exchange for a vile stew of AI slop, and there doesn’t seem to be anything we can do about it.
On a grand scale, there probably isn’t. Jones recognized this 90 years ago. But on an individual and community level, there is one thing left to us.
Jones indicates the way forward in his only short poem, “A, a, a Domine Deus,” an exquisite reflection on the tragedy of modern technology. In the poem, the speaker is trying to find the image of God in a world dominated not by human making but by technology and the artifacts made by technology (“He’s tricked me before / with his manifold lurking-places,” says the poet).
I have felt for His wounds
in nozzles and containers.
I have wondered for the automatic devices
I have tested the inane patterns
without prejudice.
I have been on my guard
not to condemn the unfamiliar,
For it is easy to miss Him
at the turn of a civilization.
This is a posture of remarkable openness. That first line particularly suggests the possibility that the incursions of the machine on human identity may reveal to us new depths of the mystery of Christ’s sacrifice—a beautiful hope indeed. But the poem itself is marked by profound sadness, a sense that God Himself is withdrawing from us, or rather that we are obscuring Him ever more with our machine-made abundance.
The way forward, Jones indicates, is not a way of sweeping successes. Rather, it is a hard path marked by careful attention both to what has come before and what is being made now. Jones quotes Nennius at the beginning of the “Preface to the Anathemata,” saying, “I have made a heap of all that I could find.” Nennius wrote from the depths of the early Middle Ages, the part that can most truly be called Dark, as the light cast by the Roman Empire had dissipated across a fragmented Europe. Jones, too, writes in a dark age, as humanity is in the act of throwing away her most basic inheritance. The way to resist, Jones says, is to pick up the pieces of that inheritance as they fall, and gather them together, and keep them safe.
This is something we can all do. We, like Jones, can cultivate an eye to see what is true art—truly human art, intransitive and gratuitous, slipping the leash of commercialization and mass consumption. We can gather up those pieces in our homes, communities, churches—and cherish them. And we can strive to restore the practice of making, whether it be bread or spoons or blankets or poems or songs or tales. Every little thing made by human hands and hearts, wrought with an eye to beauty as well as function, made so that the making reflects back into our souls as well as outward into the world, is a cry of hope that rings out not just in this world but in the world to come.
