ChatGPT and You

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December 18, 2022

4 min read

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The new AI program is uncanny in its ability to mimic human writing. Are you becoming redundant?

When my son asked ChatGPT, a new artificial intelligence (AI) initiative that’s taking the world by storm, to write a poem, the AI program came up with a beautiful, inspiring one about human dignity and greatness:

Rising up from the dawn of time
A beacon of home, a symbol of might
Humanity stands tall and proud
Defying the darkness, defying the doubt…

The poem continues on for a few more stanzas before declaring “For we are the ones who will shape the future.”  This AI-generated work is ostensibly about mankind, but it might as well be about ChatGPT itself.

Since its recent debut, social media feeds around the world have been awash in quotes generated by the program. As many teachers have noted, ChatGPT can produce passable school papers, well-written letters, poems, and uncanny answers to questions like “what’s the meaning of life.”  The possibilities for cheating have educators of all stripes worried.  “You can no longer give take-home exams,” complained University of Toronto Professor Kevin Bryan.  “I think chat.openai.com may actually spell the end of writing assignments,” noted Professor Samuel Bagg from the University of South Carolina.

ChatGPT’s technology is produced by OpenAI, a San Francisco based company funded by Microsoft.  Like some other AI programs, it generates written text, drawing on writings that are already publicly available on the Internet.  OpenAI, as its name implies, differs from some other AI companies in allowing the public to interact with its product, dubbed ChatGPT.

When my son and I tried it out together, it was glitchy but uncanny in its verisimilitude.  It was so human-seeming that we asked how it differed from real life people.  “As an artificial intelligence,” the program typed out for us, “I am not capable of experiencing emotions in the same way that human beings do.”  That was only somewhat reassuring.  Could AI ever replace human intuition and know-how in school, work, or even conversations with other people?

My son thought that the ChatGPT’s answers were “so creepy,” and I reassured him that it was merely a computer program, created by brilliant but otherwise ordinary people.  Its preternatural-seeming scope of knowledge is possible only because of the reams of information that people have uploaded to the internet already.

There’s a spiritual element, a spark of the divine, in every human being that makes us holy, and that’s something a machine could never duplicate.

I was about to explain how AI could never take the place of people because there’s a spiritual element, a spark of the divine, in every human being that makes us holy, and that is something a machine could never duplicate – but ChatGPT beat me to it.

In answer to another one of our questions, the program wrote:  “The Torah, which is the primary text of Judaism, teaches that human beings are precious because they are created in the image of God. This concept is expressed in the Hebrew phrase "b'tzelem Elohim," which means "in the image of God." According to the Torah, this means that every human being has inherent value and dignity, and is deserving of respect and care.”

I couldn’t have said it better myself.  ChatGPT even gave us the reference for God’s creating human beings in His image so we didn’t have to look it up ourselves: Genesis 1:27.

No matter how smart the AI program becomes, humans are fundamentally different.  The Talmud observed that when a person “stamps several coins with one seal, they are all similar to each other.  But the supreme King of kings, the Holy One, Blessed be He, stamped all people with the seal of Adam, the first person…and yet no one exactly resembles another” (Mishna Sanhedrin 37a). Each person is given a unique task in this world, and it is our job to utilize our free will to actualize our full potential and bring out our inimitable light that comes through striving to be like God. As the Mishna concludes, “Each and every person is obligated to say: The world was created for me.”

None of us are as clever as AI. Few of us can write as well; certainly, no one can solve problems as well as a computer program.  AI challenges us to ask what exactly it is that sets us apart and lifts us up above even the most human-seeming and brilliant technology.  It’s not our abilities; it’s our very essence, our soul.  No two human beings are alike, yet we each bear the stamp of our Creator.

As AI raises questions of what it means to be human, let’s strengthen each other’s unique holiness and embrace the spiritual essence that truly sets us apart.

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