‘There Is No More Soul’

by Tlholo Modiba – Design Lecturer The Vega School at Emeris Pretoria

In his book ’12 Notes: On Life and Creativity’, the late, great, world-beloved, trumpeter, composer, record and television producer, Quincy Jones, shared wisdom from his career in the art and music industry, that spanned well-over half a century. Amongst many others, The Thriller producer shared two observations that have never quite left me: firstly, that creative output can and should comprise of both sides of the brain; left and right – which meant satisfying the need to balance emotional creativity with analytical understanding. Secondly, that culture and context inform communication and connection, which are the conduits for understanding between people. This, for me, emphasised the importance of artistic expression that is grounded in contextual and embodied experience. In other words, who you are, where you are, and when you are, can and should be reflected in what you make and how you think.

I wonder what Quincy would have made of Artificial Intelligence and the role it plays in the creative process today. Would he have embraced it? Would he have rejected it? I don’t know for sure, and maybe the binary isn’t that simple. Maybe it’s about understanding the trade-offs and having an informed approach that acknowledges situational nuance. Perhaps though, before we discuss approaches, impact and trade-offs, it’s important to define what it is we’re talking about when we refer to AI in this article, because these days AI can be found in everything from writing software to washing machines.

“Generative AI, sometimes called GenAI, is artificial intelligence (AI) that can create original content such as text, images, video, audio or software code in response to a user’s prompt or request.” (ibm.com, 2026)

So here we’re talking about ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and everything text, image and sound generating that responds to prompts – Suno, Sora, etc. This form of AI uses deep learning algorithms that are trained on large amounts of data to simulate human decision making and thinking. I try and visualize these algorithms as giant spreadsheets called to formulaically create collages of whatever lives on the internet. These ‘everything collages’ have come to be referred to as ‘slop’, because of the indiscriminate way in which data is mushed together to produce the average sum of its parts, which is usually tasteless artifice.

There’s an idea that GenAI reshapes (and enhances) human creativity by serving as a powerful co-creator, and that it democratises access to artistic tools while accelerating brainstorming. We’re not even going to get into the inherent contradiction of tools that are meant to have a ‘democratic’ purpose while being privately owned - that’s for a whole different article. What is worth discussing here though, is the reshaping of human creativity.

This isn’t a unique effect of AI. Human creativity, and the creative process of any art form, coming into contact with new technology is bound to be reshaped. New technology creates new environments, and new environments create new people, or as Father John Culkin, Professor of Communication at Fordham University, summarises: “First we shape our tools, then our tools shape us”. We can see an example of this in the transformation of Hip Hop music and the associated production processes before and after the advent of the Akai MPC – which allowed for a more independent and accessible approach to sampling and sequencing which were the bedrock techniques for hip hop music.

As a design lecturer, overseeing the development of undergraduate and postgraduate students, I’ve gradually seen the role of AI rise to greater prominence in the work of undergraduate students: first they used AI to finish, then they used AI to start, now they can’t design without it. GenAI, specifically in the form of ChatGPT, first entered the lecture room space with the role of double-checking and enhancing finished works that students had produced, but as its capabilities grew, and the students became more au fait with the interface. The platform became a working assistant for understanding problems, proposing solutions, and even for producing finished work. The role of the student became reduced to more of a curator than a creator, and the challenge then became one of how one could curate that which they didn’t creatively understand.

Some softer but essential elements of creative development seem to have been stifled through the early adoption of AI in creative work, such as the development of creative courage. The averaging of creative outputs or solutions through the collage method employed by algorithms has led to outcomes that are predictable and safe amongst students concerned with being correct rather than creative. I say this to say that the dominance of left brained analysis through the spreadsheeted executions of AI have left the creative development of the average design student right brain deficient. The embodied, context-specific, creation of the heart and soul has been replaced by the data first, non-contextual, standardised regurgitations of machine learning.

I don’t know what all this means for the professional creative industry, where creativity is quantified and measured as content, and perhaps that’s a conversation for another day, too. However, what I can tell you from the frontlines of the lecture room is that the act of creation, and the process of creativity, is being surrendered in ways that make me wonder what will be left behind in a couple of years. I remain cautiously pessimistic though, because the human being has always found a way to persevere, to continue, and to thrive in any and all circumstances, so I wait with bated breath to see what it will look like for us to thrive in a world without soul.