On One Foot
Rabbi Joan Friedman RESPONSA COMMITTEE CHAIR, CENTRAL CONFERENCE OF AMERICAN RABBIS
contractor to build this house: to claim something written with AI as one’s own, we found that misleading and g’nei- vat da’at (intellectually dishonest). We said we are not making grand pronouncements on AI and large language models, but in this particular cir- cumstance, there is a difference between a person being completely original and a person using AI to create some- thing. And we think that there’s a difference, there’s a lack of originality that needs to be acknowledged, and not to [acknowledge it] is being deceptive. AI cannot do what any rabbi does, or any face-to-face person is doing, which is to take into account the circum- stances of the questioner and to ask the questioner: Why are you asking that? What do you need? And I would not necessarily trust it to carefully capture all of the nuance that a person could. THERE ARE TWO ISSUES underlying the question of whether chatbots should have a role in shaping people’s practice of Judaism. One has to do with an LLM’s capacity to provide accurate information with clear sourcing, backed up by human authorities—that is, with its capacity to issue answers and interpretations that are authoritative and trustworthy. This is a matter of the substance of a chatbot’s answer. On that score, there is reason to believe that, eventually, LLM-based tools will exist that can credibly answer specific questions about Jewish practice and thought. But there is a somewhat separate issue that is perhaps at least as important, which is a psychological one: What does it mean for a person to be in relationship to a machine, to turn to it with their spiritual, religious, and deeply personal questions? There is real danger in humans developing deep attachments to chatbots—attachments that superficially mimic relationships to other humans, and which can come with all the attendant feelings of dependence and vulnerability. AI cannot and will not ever be a replacement for a real-life relationship with a rabbi, mentor, study partner, or friend. Judaism exists in community. Halakha exists in community. A rabbinic answer, by necessity, takes into account the person asking it and the cultural milieu where it is being asked. Insofar as Judaism evolves, it does so because of social forces and human innovation. This is what Or- thodoxy calls mesorah (tradition), which values the relationship between teacher and student and seeks to adapt to the chang- ing world. This is the force that drove others to develop their own thriving forms of Judaism. If we hand the reins to AI, then the Judaism of the future will no longer be the living, breathing tradition that we have known for millennia.
I HAVE BEEN USING AI in many ways as a rabbi. In particular, I’ve been using it to create poetry that I use as part of our min- yan. For example, I have created poems for the Asher Yatzar, for Kaddish, etc. These poems are the result of my prompts, and carefully selected themes that I wish to incorporate. I do not believe someone without a sophisticated understand- ing of Judaism could create what I create. If I write a story or poem with AI, can I take credit for the work, or do I need to indicate that it was created using AI? We found that using AI is like using a tool, but not in the sense of a hammer. We asked ourselves whether we re- gard this as if somebody says I built a house, does that mean that they physically built it, or that they hired a contractor to build it? And for us, it still seemed closer to having hired a
5 A LUTHERAN PASTOR writing in a conservative think tank journal, Sutton warns of the dangers of relying too much on AI by pointing to the potential loss of human cre- ativity. The distinction he describes here, between things and devices, is tricky to maintain: try telling your grandmother that a washing machine is just a device and if she doesn’t “en- gage” with the laundry she risks all of human creativity. Put another way, the extent to which any individual relates to an object as a device, rather than a thing, may have as much to do with novelty and with cultural expectations as anything inherent to the objects themselves. The printing press, which automated writing, and may seem analogous to Sutton’s fur- nace supplanting the wood stove operator, not only created a massive explosion of Jewish creativity and thought by al- lowing many more people to read and study written works, it created whole new cohorts of creative skills, like type de- signers and printers. Chatbots, arguably, have the same potential. Sutton is right in saying we need to be vigilant and monitor how their use is adopted and evolves. We have to look only to social media to see how our use of a technology can go awry. He is also right that we do not want our generation to be the last to know what human creativity looks like. But he neglects the changing cultural context: just as a person can engage cre- atively in making or interpreting a printed book as much as a calligraphed scroll, our relationship to chatbots—and the extent to which we are able to engage with them creatively and skillfully—is likely to change over time.
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