high-soul AI

Is whatever you're prompting into existence helping open people up to each other, themselves, and the world? Or is it creating more distance?

There’s a kind of AI productivity fever spreading through the startup world right now. Founders are diving deep into new coding tools and building constantly. I know people who are sincerely building multiple companies at the same time because, well, they can.

If you haven’t tried, the prompts you type into Claude Code or Codex feel almost like incantations. You say a few words and poof, you manifest a new app or website. With jobs at stake in a world where self-worth is based on productivity, people are getting aggressive.

Build build build and make make make that money!

New tech, same old incentives. Seems we didn’t learn our lesson when ‘move fast and break things’ accidentally broke democracy. A new generation of technologists are forgetting to ask not only if we can, but if we should.

In this age of algorithms, what we should be doing is constantly asking ourselves whether what we’re prompting into existence is bringing us closer together or further apart.

“Siri, clear my inbox!”

This isn’t just about creators, designers, developers, and entrepreneurs. Everyday practical users of AI are also struggling to decide what’s worth generating. The simplest example: AI for text communication.

Is it okay to ask a bot to write an email, read it over, and send it to someone? Or is the use of AI actually decreasing the authentic connection between you and the recipient? The answer is not as obvious as it seems.

If you force someone else to spend more time reading than you did generating, that’s a red flag. It means you let AI take the wheel, and you left it up to the recipient to decipher its vagueness, sparkly metaphors, and em dashes. You left them to search for you between the lines. Odds are, they won’t find much. This creates distance.

But that doesn’t mean you should never use AI to help you write. To me, what’s important is whether or not the other person can sense your presence on the other side of your words. Can they find you in the text?

Well, let me ask you this: Can you find me in this text? Do you feel me on the other end of this article you’re reading? Or does this feel like AI slop? Because full disclosure: I used AI to help me write this. But I didn’t just say ‘write a post’ and leave it that. I actually recorded myself speaking these words.

I had the lightbulb go off on ‘high-soul AI’ while driving home from the gym. I parked the car, hit record, and am now speaking this post out loud directly. I’ll put the transcript into AI and ask it to clean things up but preserve all my vocabulary, metaphors, and examples verbatim. I’ll take time to edit from there.

So what you’re reading is mostly coming right out of my mouth, but AI will help clear out the ‘er’s and ‘um’s and refine the run-ons so you can more clearly surf my stream of consciousness. To me, this feels like a more heartfelt way of using AI. It’s increasing the bandwidth of what I’m trying to share with you, and my ability to share it. Kerouac might even approve.

AI apps need more SOUL

AI already has us questioning who we really are, and who each other are. So when we prompt AI to create something for us, it’s not a stretch to ask: is this helping us know ourselves? Is it helping us know each other? Or is it getting in the way?

We especially want this kind of high-soul AI in intimate spaces. For therapy, companions, social, education, spirituality, and the like, we need tools that clarify the heartfelt signal and reduce the conceptual noise. Tools that do the opposite are dangerous.

Virtual therapists and gurus that pretend to be human isolate vulnerable people. Instead, let’s create and engage with AI that helps people find the heart of what human therapists and teachers have excavated. Offer direct benefits, personalize the message, yet also tie it back to its human sources.

Speaking of isolating vulnerable people: AI companions. Oof, it’s hard to imagine how they could deepen human heart connection, but I do think it’s possible. Forget the bots that stuff our healthy need for connection with illusions. We don’t need more sycophantic romantic AI partners telling us how great we are, but that doesn’t mean a more skillfully designed companion can’t help us make sense of ourselves, other people, or the world.

In education, this almost speaks for itself. Low-soul AI is just doing the work for students or pretending to be a human tutor. High-soul AI can help teachers personalize education, flip the classroom, and find more space for genuine human contact and mentorship. I’ve personally seen high-soul AI watching parents and kids laugh together while spinning up fantasy worlds with Little Magic Stories.

In grief and death, the low-soul approach would be building AI re-creations of deceased loved ones that help you avoid feeling your feelings. The high-soul approach encourages people to process their grief, or even interview elderly family members to capture their stories before they pass.

You get the idea.

Uhhh… ‘soul’?

You might be wondering about my use of the word ‘soul’ here. I don’t actually use this word when talking about mindfulness or spirituality very much. I use it more when talking about music.

I’ve always liked music with soul. Not the genre. More the idea that music can be made from the heart. To communicate something real, something beyond words. I light up when there’s a vulnerability in the music you can just feel. I like my music soulful.

Yet AI music can fool us. If you haven’t tried Suno, it’s surreal. Type a prompt, get a song. Seems fundamentally soulless, but is it? Certainly feels that way for anyone who experienced heartbreak when they found out Sienna Rose isn’t real.

At the same time, I was recently dying laughing with some old friends listening to a few AI tracks I prompted full of inside jokes. It was AI music generated in only a few seconds, but there was soul in that moment. There was a human intention behind it and real connection taking place.

Asking AI to create random sounds that sound like music seems kinda pointless. So does letting it erode the joy of the creative process. Yet using it to share a heartfelt message, reminisce, or as part of an authentic creative process doesn’t. AI can be used to increase the bandwidth of genuine human connection. AI deepening the signal, not replacing it.

I’m not naive, it’s going to be hard to resist the temptation to lose each other completely, hiding in our burrows with our devices. But I predict the world is only going to get more and more desperate for genuine, heart-wrenching soul. The kind that gives you chills. The kind that gives you hope. The kind that makes you feel like you’re not alone.

Sure, AI was trained on shares from real human beings, real lives, real pain and joy. But when you mix all of that together into one giant melange, the soul gets lost. You’re no longer in direct contact with any particular heartfelt human, but with a statistical ghost. A strand of recombined conceptual information. It can trick our conceptual minds, but we can feel that the soul is missing.

For each prompt we type, we can ask: is whatever I’m manifesting into reality helping open people up to each other, themselves, and the world? Or is it creating more distance?

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