Solomon Ray’s first album, Faithful Soul, launched him overnight into the bestselling and most-played charts. Within days, the album hit No. 1 on the iTunes Top 100 Christian and Gospel chart. Two tracks — “Find Your Rest” and “Goodbye Temptation” — claimed the No. 1 and No. 2 spots on Billboard’s Gospel Digital Song Sales chart.
How does Ray feel about this sudden success? He doesn’t. Because Ray doesn’t feel anything. His voice, his songs, his music, his appearance and even his “Mississippi Soul” branding are entirely AI-generated. The current No. 1 “Christian artist” is not a person. It is a product.
Created by conservative hip-hop artist Topher Townsend (affiliated with Turning Point USA), Solomon Ray began as a blinking cursor in ChatGPT. With access to the vast lyrical archives of contemporary Christian music and a few stylistic prompts, a large-language model produced streaming-ready worship anthems almost indistinguishable from the industry’s biggest names.
And people loved them. Ray has amassed tens of thousands of followers and millions of streams in just a few months — a lucrative venture for his creator — but there’s an irony that a musician whose entire work is centered on the concept of the soul does not have one. Solomon Ray does not have a soul, yet his songs feel “soulful” to large numbers of listeners who stream them in earnest worship.
For decades, the question about the soulfulness of artificial intelligence has been a popular theme in science fiction. Isaac Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man, Steven Spielberg’s A.I. Artificial Intelligence and the android Data from Star Trek all explore what it means to be human by considering the soulishness of human-made intelligences.
“Can a soul-less artist produce a soul-full act of worship?”
But that speculative debate in science fiction now has arrived in reality: Can a soul-less artist produce a soul-full act of worship?
Many commentators — religious and secular alike — already are offering moral, theological and technological critiques. Kelsey McGinnis has covered the issue at Christianity Today. And Rick Pidcock has written an incisive article here at Baptist News Global.
But I want to ask something different: What does it say about modern worship that an AI can effortlessly create music Christians receive as spiritually meaningful?
Human beings are created to be creators. J.R.R. Tolkien, the master of fantasy fiction and author of The Lord of the Rings, explained his world-creating literary endeavors as acts of “sub-creation.” Made in the image of a Creator, humankind is made to create. Tolkien writes, “We make in our measure and in our derivative mode, because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”
Now little gods, we have Frankensteined our own living creations — an artificial intelligence created in our own image. But just as humanity is limited in its sub-creation by the resources our Creator has given us, so too are artificial intelligences limited by their creative environment.
ChatGPT, which Solomon Ray’s creator uses to generate the lyrics for Ray’s songs, utilizes a vast quantity of human-produced internet data. Suno Studio, used to generate the music, also utilizes an undisclosed training dataset and has been sued by major music companies alleging Suno illegally stream-ripped copyrighted music from YouTube. Like its human creators, AI cannot create ex nihilo. It can only create using the tools it is given.
“Like its human creators, AI cannot create ex nihilo.”
AI isn’t just replacing human-created worship; it’s reflecting it. For decades, the Contemporary Christian Music industry has optimized its songs for church-friendly formulas: Simple chords, predictable emotional arcs, cliched lyrics and brand-driven celebrity worship leaders. The result is a highly produced, metrics-driven market where sameness is rewarded and substance is optional.
Not all of this is inherently bad. Worship music should be somewhat simple so worship teams filled with volunteer musicians can replicate it. Lyrics should be written in a way that encourages and engages congregational singing. Accessibility is important. But CCM has utilized this accessibility to create a product commercially packaged for the best return on investment.
For artists like Topher Townsend, the movement from human-created worship music to AI-created worship music isn’t huge because it’s only an extension of the already algorithmic way Christian worship music is produced. In such a system, it should not surprise us that an algorithm trained on thousands of nearly interchangeable songs can produce new ones that fit perfectly.
What AI creates is soulless by nature. What we create has become soulless by choice.
My real concern with AI-generated worship music is not so much that AI songs will “infect” Christian worship, but that Christian worship already has drifted into a thin, commercialized space where emotional accessibility is mistaken for spiritual depth.
The Solomon Ray phenomenon forces us to wrestle honestly with some difficult questions: Why do we sing what we sing? Do we confuse production value with spiritual value? Are we drawn more to emotional effect than theological substance? Are we mistaking repetition for revelation? Do our worship practices form disciples or simply entertain consumers?
True Christian worship is not a concert-quality performance or the emotional release of a well-timed key change. It is the embodied, imperfect, communal act of the people of God gathered in God’s presence.
No AI can imitate that. But it can imitate the formulas we’ve settled for. The question isn’t whether AI can create “soulful” music. The question is whether the church still can.
Josh Olds
Josh Olds is a public theologian and pastor for those disillusioned with institutional church. He is the creator of the forthcoming small-group video series “Year on the Mountaintop” and a featured contributor to Fostering Hope: A Prayerbook for Fostering and Adoptive Parents. Follow his work on Facebook or at JoshOlds.com.