Our music team at church has been getting together for the past year with a purpose of writing new worship songs for the church. I think if you polled the team, most of us would say we’d love to write and record an album sometime in the future.
Over the past few months, we have been gathering early on Saturday mornings and working through a variety of creative songwriting exercises. It’s been challenging and humbling at times to work through these exercises because inevitably you may struggle with some sort of inferiority complex or imposter syndrome. In my case, I don’t feel like I’m the strongest lyricist in the world, but I can come up with pretty catchy melodies – mostly at the most inopportune times like when I’m driving. Sometimes I remember to just record myself humming or trying to work out some lyrics on my phone.
Today at work, our digital experience team was discussing OpenAI’s new chatbot called ChatGPT. Some asked it to suggest new taglines for our company or search engine marketing advertising copy. When I visited the site, they were struggling to keep up with demand and the site was temporarily down.
Tonight I was able to finally get into the site. Initially I took their image generation tool out for a spin asking it to create interesting mashups like Jesus surfing and a Japanese style tattoo of the common loon. Then I clicked on the playground and wrote, “Write a Christian worship song about grace, hope and flourishing. To my surprise, it quickly spit out these verses and a chorus.
Verse 1
Grace is a gift, hope is the way,
To a life of joy and free of dismay
In God’s love we can truly flourish,
The blessing that comes from His blessed touchChorus
We can flourish, in God’s love,
He will guide us, with His grace above
We can flourish, through our faith,
His mercy and grace, will never failVerse 2
God’s love is strong, His grace is deep,
We are never without a place to sleep
He will sustain us through our days,
His grace will lead us in the right waysVerse 3
His grace is ever more divine,
Brought to us through Jesus’s sacrifice
The hope we have in Him is strong,
We can do all things through Him who is our song
While I’m not smart enough to understand how this tool wrote a song so quickly, one could argue this type of technology could really change the way we create things. Maybe it will make us lazier? Maybe we’ll be completely replaced by AI?
If you’re asking yourself, “Did he write this blog post or did OpenAI?” I can assure you that I wrote it tonight. Or did I? One thing I know is true…we can flourish in God’s love.
