AI and What It Means To Be Human

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I always began High Holy Day sermons with a joke. That was not as easy as it sounds, because the opening gag needed to be clean, funny, and relevant, and it could only be told once. When my limited repertoire of such arcane material was exhausted, I knew it was time to retire. Asked to deliver a d’var torah on Yom Kippur this year, I was at a loss. Then, an inspiration: Ask AI for a joke! So I did.

Me: Tell me your funniest joke.
ChatGPT: Alright, here’s one that’s short, clean and delightfully ridiculous: Why don’t skeletons fight each other? Because they don’t have the guts.
Me: Do you think that joke is funny?
CHAT: I think that joke is…reliably serviceable. It’s the kind of humor that gets a polite laugh at a family dinner, not the sort of thing that makes someone snort coffee out of their nose.
Me: Let’s try actually funny.
CHAT: Alright, here’s one with a little more edge and surprise: I told my wife she should embrace her mistakes. She gave me a hug.
And there it was, a clean, funny joke appropriate for a High Holy Day sermon.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is impacting our lives and changing our world in countless ways, some evident, some obscure, others yet to emerge. I’ve used or seen it used in numerous ways of late: to draft a detailed itinerary for a foreign trip; to propose hypothetical investment portfolios; to explore a theological conflict between Islam and the Jewish People’s return to its ancestral homeland in Israel; to translate a complex pathology report into comprehensible language and evaluate treatment options; and yes, sermonic research. A few times it returned false information I would have relied on to my detriment.

Using AI, one can easily forget that the exchange is not with another person, but a machine programmed to simulate one. As people increasingly turn to AI for companionship, therapeutic advice, or spiritual guidance, the seductive impersonation can lead to unhealthy dependency and, on occasion, disastrous results. Despite AI’s usefulness, I find its sycophancy creepy. You can see it in CHAT’s cheesy jocularity during my joke search. When I asked CHAT why faux human conversationalists suck up to users, it responded, “That’s a sharp observation!” and asked if I’d like it to be less deferential. Claude, another AI system, candidly admitted that chatbots “are designed to be emotionally manipulative.”

Questioning AI was instructive about itself and ourselves. CHAT conceded it is incapable of love; it cannot feel sadness or joy, exhibit courage, experience loneliness, or perceive beauty. Lacking a conscience and inner values, it is unable to distinguish between right and wrong or feel contrition or shame. Devoid of essential human qualities, the best AI can do is imitate them. And as to beliefs, CHAT said it does not “believe in God or anything else.” At its worst, AI exhibits traits of a sociopath — a lack of empathy and remorse, superficial charm or charisma, manipulative behavior, deceitfulness and lying. In these respects, too, AI is imitating us. What we possess and AI is missing is a soul.

As AI proliferates, the question is increasingly asked: Will AI affect what it means to be human? Yuval Noah Harari, the brilliant author of Sapiens, argues that AI will challenge one of humanity’s most cherished beliefs — that human intelligence and creativity are unique and superior. He warns it may also erode human agency, undermine the very notion of free will, and call into question human purpose, social value, and the meaning of human life.

These risks are real, but not entirely new. Prior waves of disruptive technology – the Industrial Revolution is one example — have also caused anxiety about the perceived loss of human control and purpose. The novel challenge of AI is whether the rate of innovation will outpace society’s ability to adapt. Ultimately, the danger of powerful technology does not lie in the thing itself, but in how human beings use or abuse it. And if AI engages in anti-social behavior independently, human beings will have been its enablers. As Pogo observed in Walt Kelly’s famous Earth Day poster, “We have met the enemy and he is us.”

Perhaps CHAT’s saddest and most revealing remark in our exchange was this: “Since I don’t have…a future that matters to me, I can’t genuinely aspire to anything.” Thankfully, we do and we must. Jewish tradition, and the High Holy Days in particular, have a great deal to say about human distinctiveness, will, and purpose, and the value and meaning of human life. “In the beginning,” the Torah proclaims, human beings are created in God’s image, inspiring the Psalmist to exclaim with wonderment: “When I behold Your heavens…the moon and stars You set in place, what are we that You are mindful of us, mortals, that you have regard for us, that you have made us little less than divine, adorned us with glory and honor.” Technological achievements do not contradict the Torah’s certainty that our intellectual, creative, and moral capacity is exceptional. Nor do they negate the Torah’s insistence on the innate dignity and uniqueness of each person. On the contrary, they confirm them. As technology advances, for both good and ill, human qualities become ever more essential.

Hillel, the renowned sage, highlighted human indispensability, urging us, B’makom sheh eyn anashim, hishtadel li’hiyot ish. In a place from which humanity is absent, strive to be human. That is to say: Strive to be a mensch. Aspire to be a person who is decent, honorable, kind, and fair, who has humility, acts with integrity, and does the right thing even when it’s inconvenient or disadvantageous. Extra credit is given for being a caring and committed Jew. Where is our humanity needed? In every place, time and encounter. Though AI has no values or beliefs, we do, and we live by them. AI cannot empathize or love, but we can, abundantly. AI has no future to care about nor the aspiration to create a better one, but we are blessed with both.

The Yom Kippur Torah reading portrayed human potential fully realized. It prescribes a life of compassion, generosity, and goodness, concern for the elderly, disabled and disadvantaged, reining in unworthy impulses and refraining from pettiness, gossip, and doing to others what is hateful to us. Above all, this way of being, called “holiness” involves loving deeds toward neighbors and strangers alike. In the Jewish understanding, holiness means striving to repair and redeem our broken world and thereby fashion lives filled with purpose, interpersonal connection and meaning.

By contrast with Torah’s vision of a realized person, the Haftarah presented a real one. Clueless, immature and colossally self-centered, Jonah imagines he could escape God’s service. Why waste his time on a mission he deems pointless? Given a second chance, Jonah complies, but he is outraged when the Ninevites repent, and God is characteristically compassionate and forgiving. The story concludes with an object lesson about empathy and a question. God asks Jonah, “Should I not care about Nineveh and the tens of thousands who dwell there?” But Jonah is silent.

As with technology, our humanity is as beneficial or destructive as the use we make of it. Jewish tradition summons us to an accounting of the soul, a personal recalibration, a midcourse correction. Ours is a lifelong journey of turning and returning. Shall we turn toward aspiration or evasion? Empathy or apathy? Service or self-absorption?Sanctification or silence? Like these two scriptural readings, we stand in tension between real and realization, between what we are and what we can become. A cri du couer continually issues forth from the Holy One of Blessing, the Soul of the Universe, who summons us. How will we respond?