Christopher Watkin and Brett McCracken talk about AI, art, attention, and why human creativity still matters when machines can make beautiful things in seconds.
What is the point of making art when a machine can do in seconds what it takes a human years to learn?
That question sits at the heart of this episode with Brett McCracken. Brett is Senior Editor at The Gospel Coalition and a perceptive writer on faith, media, technology, and culture. In our conversation, he helps us see that AI threatens not only jobs or industries, but something deeper: our sense that the process of making, wrestling, waiting, and learning might actually matter. Great art, he argues, is never just about the polished final product. It is also about praise, patience, formation, and the personal gift one human being offers to another.
We talk about why wisdom is more than information, why AI can imitate emotion without sharing in human suffering, and why boredom, solitude, and even daydreaming may be among the most important human habits to protect in an age of constant optimization. Brett also reflects on the attention economy and the subtle ways our desires are being shaped by technologies designed to keep us looking, clicking, and consuming.
Brett joined me on Silicon Spiritualities to explore what AI is doing to art, attention, and discipleship, and why some of the most human things we do may also be the least efficient.
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