Recently, my YouTube feed has been dishing up videos of ambient background music created without AI. With uncanny precision, the internet gods of YouTube have identified my sympathies. They seem to know that I have declared unending war on so-called “art” made by artificial intelligence. I play these recommended videos out of mere protest – even if I don’t particularly like the music – against all the ambient music on YouTube that are generated by AI (and they are legion). The fact that some creators are now specifically labelling their videos “no AI” or “AI free” makes me wonder just how many other pieces of music I’ve listened to were generated by the lifeless, empty circuits of a computer and passed off as genuine human creations.

Apparently, I’m not the only one attracted to YouTube creators who boldly proclaim their independence from artificial intelligence. Many of these videos have hundreds of thousands of views – some more than a million. One channel, Yellow Cherry Jam, featuring dreamy soundscapes and color-saturated footage of a hipster couple and a dog in natural spaces, is dedicated solely to producing non-AI lo-fi music. The absence of artificial intelligence is their niche, their brand.

“We all see how AI slop is filling the internet,” Yellow Cherry Jam writes in the description of a recent video. “It’s scary, it’s getting harder and harder to find something real behind all that noise. But we’re still here, right? We’re still valu[ing] something real and we are searching, and creat[ing] demand for art. Then [sic] easier it becomes to create content, the more people start appreciating real human effort.”

The comments section below Yellow Cherry Jam videos reveal sentiments of impassioned appreciation. A sampling:

“So tired of all the AI slop. Thank you for keeping up the good fight! Really enjoy the vibes!”

“Guys, I can’t express how much we appreciate your videos! In the sea of AI, you stand out not only because of your talent, but also because of your dedication to creating real art. You inspire us to keep going as well with our AI-Free channel. THANK YOU!”

“I hate that we’re in the age where I have to type ‘No AI’ for me to be able to consume and support actual human content. I appreciate this channel so much.”

Clearly, Yellow Cherry Jam is filling a real void that people sense, the void of a technological and artistic landscape drained of the human touch – no, worse, the human heart – like a photograph sapped of color. What we’re seeing in the music space applies to other domains of the arts and letters: fiction, painting, photography, video, etc. A June 2025 article from the Guardian highlights “the creatives and academics rejecting AI – at work and at home.” The concerns of these AI resistors range from those who see AI as dangerous to society, to those who simply value people more than machines, to those who think AI is just too darn unreliable (a recent study found that AI answers more than 60% of inquiries falsely).

I think a large swath of the population retains the common sense idea that the arts and humanities are about, well, humans. “I read because I want to understand how somebody sees something, and there’s no ‘somebody’ inside the synthetic text-extruding machines,” Emily Bender, a linguistics professor at the University of Washington, puts it succinctly for The Guardian.

The Yellow Cherry Jams and Emily Benders of the world form a substantial group even if they are in the minority. I suspect that as AI continues to take over everything from academia to the arts, the resistant minority will grow, creating new markets for resistors who pride themselves on their non-AI content. A new market niche will emerge for the natural, humanely minded. I wonder if we’ll see a future where some sort of “Certified AI-Free” badge will be created, not unlike the “non-GMO” or “organic” labels that are now so common in grocery stores.

Will the AI resistors be enough to turn the tide completely? I don’t know. Arguably, there’s something even worse than the AI-caused nuclear Armageddon that threatens us – at least wars usually generate poems and ballads to memorialize the great deeds of the dead. But when we outsource the activities of the human soul – such as creating poems and ballads – to non-human entities, then we lose something even more important than our impressive modern cityscapes. The loss of the human soul is a greater tragedy than the loss of the human body. That loss is truly an apocalypse.

The modern mania for speed, efficiency, and control has run wild, sending us careening off the cliff of common sense and into a brave new world where we’d rather not be bothered even to tell our own stories or sing our own songs.

We’ve moved from C.S. Lewis’s “men without chests” to “men with computer chip chests”; an arguably even worse malady, where we seek to offload the most profoundly human of activities to mysterious technology that most of us don’t even understand. Are we so profoundly lost in a postmodern malaise that we’re simply sick of being human at all? Is that why we’re vacating our most sacred inner spaces?

We risk a future in which it would become futile to knock on the door of the human heart. You’d be greeted only by the beeps and whirrs of the machine.

That future hasn’t arrived yet. And I’m going to delay it as long as I can. That’s why, as I type these words, I’m relaxing to a tune from Yellow Cherry Jam, enjoying the pure sounds of an artistic creation that welled up from a genuine human heart, not the heartless calculations of an algorithm. It’s “Certified AI-Free.”

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This article was made possible by The Fred & Rheta Skelton Center for Cultural Renewal. 

Image credit: Pexels