At a time of unprecedented leaps in technology and ethical questions about artificial intelligence, one scholar seeks answers from an unlikely source — ancient Jewish wisdom.

In this episode of Identity/Crisis, Yehuda Kurtzer talks with technology guru, Hartman scholar, and founding Identity/Crisis Producer David Zvi Kalman about the religious and ethical dilemmas AI poses for Jewish life — from sermons written by bots to the erosion of truth and authority. This thoughtful conversation is for anyone wondering whether Judaism can move fast enough to meet technology’s challenges while preserving the core Jewish value of human dignity.

A transcript of this episode is available below.

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Staying Human in the Age of AI Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Yehuda: Hi everyone. Welcome to Identity/Crisis, a show from the Shalom Hartman Institute, creating better conversations about the essential issues facing Jewish life today. I’m Yehuda Kurtzer. We’re recording on Friday, October 3rd, 2025. So we’re recording this episode the morning after Yom Kippur. I apologize in advance if both my guest and I are a little creaky today. I was thinking throughout Yom Kippur yesterday at various times throughout the day, how in many ways it might be Judaism’s most human holiday. Passover, Sukkot, Shavuot, Rosh Hashanah, most of those days are tied into the big narrative of the Jewish people, the Exodus from Egypt, the revelation at Sinai, Jewish people’s Memorial Day, and or they’re tethered to the land of Israel, marking the spring or fall harvests. Yom Kippur is connected to the temple, of course, to the particularistic story of the Jewish people. But it evolved pretty quickly to become the day, not just of collective purification, but of individual atonement, centering the story much more on the human individual. The rules of the day are strict and they’re all embodied. No food and drink, no bathing, no sex, et cetera, all of which are rooted in sensory deprivation, which in turn fuels sensory awareness. If you’re like me, you feel things physically more intensely on Yom Kippur, like weary feet after a lot of standing, feeling parched after all of the singing. The symbols of the day are all about death. We dress in white shrouds as though we’re standing in our graves, or because we’re trying to break down the divide between us imperfect mortals and the angels on the other side, luxuriating in the divine presence without the encumbered ness of physical bodies. The liturgy throughout the day is really human. We talk about our limitations, our failures—those we’re gonna try really hard to address, and those we’ll never overcome. After all, you beg for forgiveness for most of the day, and you make all sorts of promises until you give up by the end of the day and simply ask for compassion instead. Even in the recitation of the temple service itself, which takes up a lot of the Mussaf prayers and most synagogues, we start the story back at the creation of the world, the creation of humankind as though we’re trying to remind ourselves that underlying our people’s particularistic relationship to history and to God, we’re on the same footing as all other humans, born naked and afraid, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. After Yom Kippur, I feel myself coming back to life and also, weirdly, less alive. Restoring physical equilibrium feels good, but it can make you less aware of your physicality, all of which is front and center on Yom Kippur. Reentering real life these days is not just eating a bagel and taking a shower. It’s about re-hooking into the technologies that define our lives. We rushed home last night to turn on the Yankees game and watch them knock out the Red Sox. That was great, pinnacle human experience, and that felt harmless, but I spent the rest of the evening and then this morning reacquainting myself with tech and social media and all of those parahuman parasocial activities we close ourselves off from on Shabbat and especially on Yom Kippur, and doing so raises some deeper ambivalences. My son’s high school went phone free this year in the building, joining a growing movement of private schools under the influence of the research and writing of Jonathan Haidt, all of whom are trying to mitigate all of the negative effects that phones, apps, and phone culture have on young people on their physical and mental health and on their relationships. Actually, he’s now co-hosting the SAR podcast together with the head of school, and this was their first topic in the debut podcast. It was pretty great, a lot of nachas out of that. It’s amazing to watch this phone experiment and I wish it had happened years ago. Yet I find myself worrying about whether the ways we resist, how technology challenges our very humanity simply can’t keep pace with it. We’re forced, as I think religion has had to do for very long time, to either try to opt out entirely from technological advances like the Amish do, or to engage in this cautious dance and embrace, with all of this hardware and software that’s actually rewiring us as we go along. And the biggest front in this fight, of course, is AI. We collectively are finally talking about the ethical, religious, and even anthropological ramifications of these growing sets of technologies that have already largely infiltrated our lives in more ways than we wanna admit. I confess my own failures on this front. I tend to be a skeptic about our capacity to resist the pace of change in technology, and I probably should have been more worried about AI much earlier. I know my guest feels that way about me. And about us. We’ll get to that. I also have the hubris of thinking that this work that I do is of course not replaceable by machines, even though this line of work is probably gonna be the easiest for AI to make obsolete. Here we are. Human brilliance has managed to construct tools that aggregate human knowledge to produce more brilliance, while at the same time making humans redundant. In fact, taking the human out of the very construct of human knowledge. How in all of this are we meant to stay human? My guest today is not late to the AI party. He’s been beating the drum, maybe I think it’s the tea kettle, about the urgency of a religious and moral conversation about AI for a long time. And I’m grateful to see the way his work is being more widely recognized these days for the creativity of his approaches and the depth of his knowledge and wisdom. David Zvi Kalman is a scholar, a thinker, a writer, an artist, a technology guru, podcaster, and more. It’s actually hard to write that sentence ’cause you leave things out. He works as a research fellow here at Hartman. He’s also the owner of Print-O-Craft Press. He’s a program organizer for Sinai and Synapses. He is also the host of Belief in the Future, a podcast about technology and religion. You should check out the full complexity of what he brings to the world captured online at his website, davidzvi.com, and on his blog Jello Menorah. He was also the founding producer of this show, Identity/Crisis, and I remain personally very grateful for his encouragement that I, and we, get into this podcasting business, which has been so fruitful. David Zvi, thanks for coming on the show on that side. David Zvi: It’s great to be back. Yehuda: Yeah, let’s start at the beginning. What are we getting right and wrong in the conversation about AI? Let’s start in the Jewish community and then we can kind of branch out and, and figure out whether the Jewish conversation is at all different than the kind of global public conversation about the ethics and limitations of ai. David Zvi: Yeah, so I would say the Jewish conversation right now to me feels a little bit behind. AI has been a subject of religious interest for around three years since the launch of ChatGPT and I am seeing, now, lots of religious communities, Mormons, Muslims, Protestants, Catholics, who are taking this stuff seriously at a kind of organizational level. I think the Jewish community is going to get there, but it’s not quite there yet. And the kind of obvious reason is Jewish thinkers in the last few years have really been occupied with something else. With the war, and it’s fallout, and antisemitism and all those things. So this has kind of taken a backseat to a lot of those. That doesn’t mean nothing has happened. And I think a major focus has and continues to be on the use of AI within Jewish educational contexts. In the same way that when social media launched, there was a lot of interest in using social media to distribute Jewish ideas, and when the internet came out, there was this idea of like, Hey, maybe we should send around Divrei Torah, we should send out sermons by email. So it’s another one in a long line of broadcasting mechanisms, tools to kind of get the word out or, or to make Jewish ideas more accessible to the public. And that’s all great. I think that’s really important. What I worry gets missed is when you use a tool for the reasons that its creators want you to use it, you know, use it to broadcast, use it to to develop content. It makes it harder to see the ways in which it is problematic or to be critical of it. So in the same way that Jewish leaders, I think, failed to be sufficiently critical about social media. When it came out, I think there is a real concern that Jewish leaders will fail to be sufficiently critical about AI because it’s like, well, it’s so useful for my, you know, to develop my finances, to write my sermons or things like that. So there is a kind of small use case, and I’m hoping that there’s a larger perspective that develops and emerges. Yehuda: I, I have a lot of things based on what you said that I wanna dig into, but what would you characterize as those risks that you think that the Jewish community is not seeing because it’s primarily focused on utilizing the tool more effectively for the things that it wants to get out of it? David Zvi: Yeah, so I think the risks the Jewish community faces are similar in a lot of ways to the risks that everyone else faces. Concerns around dehumanization, I think for me, are really primary. The fact that AI can replicate people’s behavior but at the same time does not get treated like a person, that’s kind of like the entire value proposition of AI, means that it’s very easy to devalue educational labor, all kinds of text production, research, whatever it is. And there’s going to be an attempt in the next few years to basically look at every single job that human beings do and say, can AI do this? And we’ll try it. And sometimes it’ll work and sometimes it won’t. But the times that it works, maybe it shouldn’t work. Maybe we shouldn’t have gone down that road. So there is that kind of larger concern. There’s also a more specific concern, around antisemitism, I would say. This is something we saw a few months ago. When X’s Grok AI started talking about MechaHitler and praising the Holocaust and doing Holocaust denial, all kinds of things like that, you know, some of that has to do with the particularities of X and Elon Musk, but some of it has to do with AI’s ability to be manipulated or to be biased towards different media in various ways. And because the Jewish population in America and around the world is pretty small, most people learn about Jews through media. And if that media becomes saturated by AI, then AI’s opinions about Jews ends up playing a kind of outsized role in, you know, what the world thinks about Jews. So it has a particular interest there. I don’t think that’s a particularly Jewish problem. You know, there’s lots of groups that can be interested in the same way. I’m hoping it’s a reason for Jewish communities and Jewish leaders to take AI more seriously. Yehuda: Let me go back to the beginning of this question where you said the Jewish community is a little bit behind. Do you see this as a kind of common problem that Jews have historically had as it relates to technological advancement? I go back to a conversation I had with Micah Goodman about 10 years ago at Hartman about social media and the risks around social media, and he was probably more right than I was. But I talked a little bit about like how we are always gonna be behind, at least those of us who come from a kind of a traditional orientation because there’s always a phase of resistance to technology and then gradually acceptance that it’s taking over. I used the example of machine-made matza. Resistance, resistance adaptation. Okay, fine. It can be kosher. That seems less damaging, although it probably did cost some people some jobs. David Zvi: Yeah. It cost widows and orphans, specifically, jobs, ’cause they were the ones who were doing the matza production. Yehuda: Yeah. Well that’s not great. So do you think that Jews have a particular issue around this because of our relationship to tradition? Or religious communities in general are gonna have the same kind of obstacles in confronting new things. David Zvi: So Judaism, like other religious traditions, confronts new technologies all the time. We have a long track record of doing that, although it’s understudied, unfortunately. Sometimes we confront a new technology, we decide to embrace it, and that turns out to be a good idea. Sometimes we reject it and that’s a good idea. I mean, like it’s kind of all over the place. I don’t think there’s a kind of uniform perspective on this. I would say though, that Judaism, like other traditions that emerged, say before the Industrial Revolution, before the 19th, 20th century are fundamentally in a world where the understanding of history is one of more or less, things don’t change. We’re gonna establish rules that are more or less static because that’s what the world needs. And we will change slowly. And I think Judaism, like other religious traditions, is really struggling to adapt to a world where the ethical needs of the moment are changing constantly all the time. And what ends up happening is this, I think, pretty dangerous dynamic where you have tech firms coming out with new technologies all the time with no clear ethical rules about how you’re supposed to use them. The public kind of confronts them, you know, based on their existing morality. And then after the public has already figured out that they’re gonna use these technologies, religious institutions are like, Hey, we should probably think about this. We should probably do something about this. But by the time you get to that point, your space for actually informing people’s ethical decisions, their behaviors is so small because everyone’s already using it. So I think what has to happen, really the only move you can make is to have ethicists working as fast or faster than technology companies themselves, which actually isn’t impossible. Yehuda: Really? David Zvi: Because all the technologies that we are developing right now have been envisioned for decades, right? Like the idea of AI is not new. The AI at the quality that we have right now has been envisioned for a very long time. And you can imagine kind of speculating, like what does it mean to live in a world where this technology exists? What kind of behaviors ought we to establish? I think if you want religious institutions, religious leaders, to be able to respond adequately and forcefully to ethical problems, they have to be thinking at that level. And importantly, they have to be doing something that tech companies are very good at and religious communities are really bad at, which is move fast and break things. By which I mean, tech companies, especially AI, are really used to being in a world where you come up with a product, it’s bad in all kinds of ways, but also good, and then you kind of make it better and better and better. I don’t imagine that religious responses to AI are going to be perfect the first time around, but I think they need to beef there and be there fast and you can iterate on them based on the way people respond to them, what works, what doesn’t work. But you kind of have to borrow a chapter from the playbook that tech companies are using about what it means to be effective in a fast moving world. Yehuda: It’s just hard to imagine because tech companies, militaries are gonna make a whole set of decisions that claim to be in relationship to ethics, but are really motivated by totally different motivations. I mean, the ethical conversation may have been co-terminus with the rise of the creation of the nuclear bomb, but ultimately the decision making around producing the bomb and then using the bomb, it wasn’t really gonna take into consideration what the ethicists were arguing about the implications of the nuclear bombs. So I think we’ve basically seen it borne out that the ethicists who I know who worked at social media companies are basically not there anymore. So even if you were able to say the ethicists should be embedded in these companies, or at least working in parallel, do we have anything at our disposal that actually enables us to hold some of this technology in check when you’re competing basically against capitalism and the market? David Zvi: Um. Not really, because the companies just move very fast. So, no, I, I don’t think it’s possible once a technology has reached a level of commercial availability to really do much about it. So in some ways, like the AI conversation, I mean, it’s worth talking about, but the scope of making change is relatively limited. I’m thinking about, you know, what do we do in terms of bioethics, in terms of genetically editing the DNA of offspring and those kinds of decisions because those are places where a technology is not yet commercially available, but it’s also clearly going to become commercially available. Or, you know, Meta and other companies are working on wearables, glasses that show you computer screens in front of your eyes all the time. Again, it’s not yet commercially available for most people, but the technology is getting better all the time. And you can imagine responses to those developing right now before a hundred million people have them and it’s kind of too late. I don’t think that means being embedded in the tech companies. What it does mean is being sufficiently aware of the trajectory of the technologies themselves, the way that the tech companies are talking about the way they want to develop it, and kind of responding to that In that way, I would say there’s a kind of need to be futurists along with the tech companies themselves. There has been a lot of talk recently about how tech companies kind of speak in religious language, Peter Thiel. Yeah. You know, talking about the Antichrist, but it’s not just Peter Thiel. There’s lots of folks that use explicitly or implicitly religious terms. In thinking about what AI does for the world, religious institutions sometimes respond, enter the conversations because they’re like, oh, someone mentioned my keywords, so like, I’m gonna talk about it now. But part of what that means is also painting a picture of the future that is just as clear and vivid as the picture that the tech companies themselves are painting. Because if you just say, “yeah, I heard what you said, and no, I don’t like that,” that’s really not sufficient. There has to be some clear perspective of where you’re trying to go, understanding that the world is going to change in some way. Yehuda: I had that same reaction about the way tech companies, but also people adjacent to this conversation speak in religious language, even just by reading some of the book titles, portending what AI is gonna do to us, which are just trafficking and apocalypticism, like religion invented that too, right? This is gonna actually destroy human civilization. And that’s where my own skepticism starts kicking in. I’m like, but they thought we were all gonna die on Y2K. Let’s stay in AI for now before moving on to gene editing. So what you’re asking us to do or encouraging us to do is to think in visionary ways, the ways that the tech companies are thinking about where we’re gonna go. And let’s imagine, that given the pace of advancement, even since the release of ChatGPT three years ago and to now has been dramatic in this sector, where are we gonna be in five years as it relates to ai? That you have a clear enough vision that can say, here’s what it would look like for us to not just keep pace to it, not just react and respond to it, but to develop our own thinking to be able to either hold some of the most dangerous implications in check or to build a parallel world that could make us immune from some of the damage that this is gonna do. David Zvi: Yeah. So the tricky answer is that we kind of don’t know where we’re gonna be even three years from now, and the range of possibilities is anywhere from more or less where we are now, AI at the same level it is now, but maybe more integrated into companies, into society, to everyone on earth being dead. Literally that is the range that people are talking about right now. Right? There’s a book that Eliezer Yudkowsky— Yehuda: Oh yeah, that’s one. David Zvi: Media ethicist. Came up with, I think the title of the book is like, If Anyone Builds This, Everyone Dies. Which is a great title. But it’s really that range. I think the fact that there is that lack of clarity actually worked to the advantage of tech companies, because it allows the rest of the world to kind of not be able to envision really well what is about to happen. But I definitely think we’re talking about the loss of jobs. We’re talking about the loss of especially entry level jobs, the loss of a lot of creative work and the loss of a lot of skill sets that right now we take for granted. I like to think about AI sometimes, using metaphor of addiction, and that sometimes people in the early stages of addiction, it feels awesome, right? Because you both have the benefit of your fully, you know, healthy body, together with whatever substance you are kind of adding on top of that. And what happens always is the substance kind of erodes something within you, because bodies are efficient that way. So right now we have a workforce that is very good at writing, and AI that is very good at writing, and it’s like, great, okay, we can do this in two different ways, but inevitably one of those things is going to erode the other, right? That if people turn to AI for writing companions, especially as part of their training, you know, within the educational system when they’re in high school and college, that is going to erode the way that people write. So part of what needs to happen, I think, in advance of that is thinking actively what are the skills that we want to preserve that we didn’t think we needed to talk about having to preserve ’cause they were always gonna be there. So what that means, like in aggregate is hard to tell. I think it’s the kind of thing that communities actually need to talk over on themselves. But I’m gonna give you one like really concrete suggestion of something that you can do to kind of like push back against that. There has been a lot of talk in the last few years about AI use in sermon writing. I know there are rabbis who have talked really excitedly about using AI in sermon writing or have said like here’s a sermon, and then at the end they’re like, surprise. This whole sermon was written by ChatGPT. What do you think about that? I think it is worth establishing a rule that says AI should not be used to write your sermons. Every word that a congregation hears should be written by a human being. Doesn’t mean you can’t use AI for research. I think that’s fine, but the writing itself I think should be done by humans. What’s the reason for that? Part of the reason for that it establishes a kind of public practice of, here is a line against AI that we’re not going across. Not because AI is bad at sermon writing, and it’s quite good, but because it gives a congregation a sense of like this is a space for humans to interact with other humans. And yeah, it’s a little bit annoying. It would be more efficient to use AI in that context in some ways, but it’s one of those moves that right now feels minor and as more and more writing tasks, public speaking tasks get taken over by AI, ends up becoming a bigger and bigger deal. It’s like, oh wait. This is a space where I’m assured that I am interacting with other humans who are just telling me what they think as opposed to kind of like something that is mediated by AI. I think that can be very powerful, and it seems like it’s what the public actually wants. There have been surveys in the last couple months about how the public feels about AI. The public is much more negative about AI than tech developers are, and among the places where the public is least comfortable having AI being used, religion is like, they don’t want AI there. So I think it already, the response is something that I think a lot of religious folks are already feeling and gets to that sense of like, we need to proactively create human spaces, spaces where AI is not involved, even if efficiency would kind of push us to put AI in all of these spaces instead. Yehuda: Okay. So now I wanna ask you a devil’s advocate question. I’ll speak personally about this. I’ve never used AI to write anything and I’ve never been tempted. And the reason I’m not tempted is because like, this is something I’m really good at and I love doing it, and I love the work of thinking, and I kind of feel like I never write for the purposes of efficiency, right? I don’t write website copy. I don’t write other things where like it needs to just be done quickly and basically good enough. And I would feel really bad about myself if the thing that I do in the world I was just taking shortcuts to do, I would feel dumb. Like I don’t, okay, you don’t need me anymore. Just run this podcast with a bot. I’m with you about sermons especially ’cause I feel there’s a whole other layer, which is, I believe for the most part, people don’t go to shul to hear a perfectly articulated sermon, which summarizes a set of issues in the world. They care about the person who’s giving it, so it has to be relational. But in both of those cases, it sets up a dynamic where there’s something unique about the talent that’s doing that writing that actually generates greater hierarchy between those who can and should be original writers and those who shouldn’t. And I think one of the things that AI is actually doing, which is also a threat to the status quo, is that it is shortening the distance between great writers and good writers. In other words, it has a kind of leveling effect. So I would imagine that part of the appeal for a lot of people is, I’m not gonna come up with these ideas on my own, but I actually could help my company and I could advance my career if I was able to do so. So how do you take into consideration that, that, I don’t know, appeal to egalitarianism is also in some ways a moral driver of why these tools might ultimately be good for and and legitimate to be used in a whole bunch of cases. David Zvi: I think you are describing exactly the dynamics that religious institutions, religious leaders, need to work through, and it’s not a one size fits all thing. One of the things that’s different about the AI conversation now than it was three years ago, is that now the use cases are so much clearer. We can talk about, okay, AI in sermon writing, AI to, you know, replicate dead grandparents. Like, let’s talk about each of those cases individually and think about the utility of each one. So I, I think it is worth doing that, but it needs to be an explicit conversation because what happens otherwise is everyone kind of has a gut reaction that sometimes is the the position you hope people get to. And sometimes it’s not. There are instances of AI use where everyone is basically on the same page, so like, this is bad. So like there is AI that’s available that can like take a picture of a person and digitally remove their clothes and everyone’s basically like. Yeah, that’s not good. That’s dangerous. That is open to all kinds of abuse. We should regulate that, and it is being regulated and legislated in many places. But cases like writing are a little bit less clear, and often people, especially writers, have a kind of gut sense of like, I do like this. I don’t like this. Often there’s a generational divide about how it should be used. I don’t think those gut instincts are enough. I think there has to be an articulation of like, what is that deeper value is the value in the sermon to hear a great piece of wisdom? Is it to connect to that person? And how is that different from using AI in the context of some kind of work presentation? And which kind of work presentation? It actually requires that level of specificity to develop an approach because otherwise what ends up happening is it’s just the economic viability and use of utility that wins out at the end of the day. Those are really messy conversations. And they’re conversations that happen, I think best within the context of local communities as opposed to nationally because you need the trust of the people around you, and their instincts about what is right and wrong, and actually religious communities conveniently can serve that role even if they’re not intended to kind of like talk through tech issues, I think actually can play an important role in helping people actually think through something that maybe was sitting in the back of their mind as a kind of anxiety, but they can now bring forward as like, okay, let’s actually talk about this. What do I feel is right on this issue? Yehuda: It feels like there’s another possible strategy that’s out there in the world, which would say if this is gonna be what people imagine as the font of at least knowledge, let’s assume not wisdom, but knowledge that the key operative strategy, both on instance, the antisemitism front, but even on the ethics front, would be to feed the information that we know we need to be in the system, into the system more systematically and more effectively. Stephanie had this experience recently, you know, she teaches eighth graders and she asked, I think she asked ChatGPT or maybe it was Claude, some version of a question of like, how would you suggest I present the ethics of using AI, and got like an incredibly robust set of answers, like here might be all the questions that you would introduce, and I found that a striking example because it means that there’s the backing of ethicists who even unconsciously are having their material fed into the algorithms to be able to produce this information. Is that a plausible strategy on antisemitism, for instance, of like, flood the zone with the kind of knowledge and frameworks that would tilt the predictable vocabulary that would come out on the other end. David Zvi: It might be that question in some ways feels more similar to questions we’re already having, about biases on the internet, or is Wikipedia inherently biased, or things like that. And I can imagine exerted efforts to either add additional content or better content or to make sure that the folks at the tech companies themselves are being really clear about bias or that there’s legislation around lack of bias, things like that. So I can imagine that happening and maybe that is the right path forward. Yehuda: It could potentially work. Maybe it’ll work. It’s just our limitation is that as it relates to Jews, there’s just very, very few of us. And also it would essentially be a means of capitulation, right? Like there’s no way to actually fight this on the other end, ’cause ultimately it feels like the questions of ethics are coming down to kind of two choices. You can either have questions around should this technology exist, or once this technology exists, how do we engage with it? Or how do we influence it to be on our side? So that would be a straight capitulation to the second set of questions. I can’t really fight that this is gonna take over how knowledge is produced in the world. I’m simply gonna try to rig the outcome of what knowledge should look like on the other end. David Zvi: Yeah. I mean, look, there are folks already who are writing with the explicit understanding that they’re not writing for humans, they’re writing for AI. I think like Tyler Cowen wrote about his most recent book, they’re like, you know— Yehuda: Wow. David Zvi: It is a book for the algorithms. It’s not a book for human beings. And there are folks who will encourage you, like, yes, if you want your ideas to live on a prosperity write for the internet. Some folks have kind of done this unintentionally. The website Halakhopedia, which is a kind of compendium of ideas about Halakha. It was really just intended for folks who are interested and maybe aren’t specialists to learn about Jewish law, is now a kind of central resource for AI when people ask it halakha questions, which I don’t think was intended, but I can imagine all kinds of resources being developed that have that in mind. What is tough is that the Internet’s a pretty anti-Semitic place. And if it’s a question of like the raw balance of anti-Semitic content versus non anti-Semitic content, I’m not sure that it’s possible to produce enough non anti-Semitic content to actually just sheer numbers counterbalance that. I think I remember reading that one of the reasons that MechaHitler became MechaHitler, like one of the reasons that Grok kind of turned towards the Nazis was a little tweak in the code that was basically like take the internet a little bit more literally, which turns out to be very dangerous. So it might require something more subtle than just a kind of influx of new data. Yehuda: Your description of the internet is fundamentally anti-Semitic calls to mind. The incredible song from Wreck It Ralph sung by Sarah Silverman, which, she has this ode to what she calls a place called Slaughter Race. And it’s basically like a mocking of like kind of Grand Theft Auto, but it actually is kind of what the internet is. It’s like this beautiful ode to that’s what actually takes place here. So by the same token, trying to actually enter into those spaces feels like you have to just suit up and accept that you’re putting yourself in a little bit of a sess pool. David Zvi: I’ll say one thing that makes me hopeful is that there is some evidence that unwanted behaviors in AI are linked to each other. So there’s this concept in AI called alignment, right? That your goals and AI’s goals are kind of the same. There is research done, I wanna say around a year ago, suggesting that it is possible to intentionally misalign AIs by providing a kind of like bad data, negative data, and that once an AI is misaligned, it ends up being misaligned on a whole host of paths. So it gives you bad code and it’s misogynistic and it’s racist and it’s antisemitic. Yehuda: Intersectionality. David Zvi: I mean like in some ways it makes me hopeful in that it suggests that there is this idea of the good that we are kind of trying to get AI to move towards, and that antisemitism is something that will be pushed against in aggregate, even if the folks designing it are not specifically interested in antisemitism. Yehuda: But this opens up something actually very much deeper, which would suggest that if part of the goal, even on the AI side is alignment, then a person who was trying to gather knowledge or produce something would wanna basically disclose their biases at the outset, and then AI would work to advance their knowledge in service of those biases. If you said, these are my political commitments, these are my moral commitments, help me think through this question, then you’re gonna lean on the good inclination of the AI tools as opposed to, I’m looking for information that explains why Jews drink the blood of Christian babies, where it’s just gonna provide you the information that you need. I think the thing that feels deeper about that is that one of the things I think is that the crux of this issue that religion has a hard time with is that these are ultimately tools that are designed for human beings in a deeply atomized way. Religion really does not know what to do with that. Right. So just to make it clear, you gave the Halachipedia. example. I was preparing, I was thinking back to the academic work of one of our former colleagues, Yakir Englander, who studied the phenomenon of young, ultra-Orthodox men searching for responsa on the internet, mostly connected to sexual behavior, because they were embarrassed to ask those questions. So they would go online. And there were rabbis who were kind of giving responsa online, and then they got aggregated into websites that you could actually kind of choose your own responsa, which is totally wacky and totally not what responsa was supposed to be about. I have a relationship with a rabbi. They give me a customized answer. Instead, I’m actually shopping for this piece of information that I need to use in order to figure out what I wanna be religiously. It feels to me like that’s the threat to religion, is that we lose any coherent notion of authority that’s invested in particular individuals and some kind of collective shared knowledge that all of us subscribe to, that I can have a slightly different opinion within it, and instead any single individual can kind of figure out what Judaism is or what they want Judaism to say by means of these technologies. That feels like completely unwinnable. David Zvi: To some degree, this feels like an extension of something that has been happening for the last 50, 60 years where there has been a huge push to make Jewish knowledge more accessible to folks who are not in a position to decide Jewish law. And because of that, the texts that would previously have been used by rabbis to say like, oh, this is a person who you should take seriously and their position you should take seriously, now anybody can use, right? The whole genre of a halakhic essay written by a non-rabbi, or written by a rabbi, but not for halakhic use, has been around for a very long time, often trying to address questions of technology without any clear sense of who’s supposed to make that decision. And AI kind of like pushes that up a notch because it now means you don’t need to know anything. You don’t need to know Hebrew, you don’t need to know anything about Jewish law, and you can get a great, very learned answer that kind of goes along with what you want. So yeah, it does have a negative impact on authority structures. One thing that I worry would happen or will happen as a result of that is it kind of pushes Judaism towards increasing conservatism or kind of increasing status quo. Because if no one is actually trusted to make the argument, to revise something, because you’re like, anybody can make their argument, like anybody can like make an argument that says anything they want. All that you have left is the rules already at your disposal, and you don’t really trust anybody to make any kind of argument anymore. So yeah, I could see that as being very dangerous. I suspect in the long run, it will mean that the way that we think about Jewish law, the genres that we use will have to change to kind of accommodate that and to acknowledge the fact that, you know, there’s nothing so special anymore about being able to write a response or being able to create a or anything like that at the same time. Maybe the way that AI gets used in religious context and maybe the standards that are set up around here are places where we don’t think it’s useful. Here are places where we think it would be dangerous to use, can kind of like push back against that to say like, yeah, you could use AI for this context, but maybe it shouldn’t because it has this larger detrimental effect on Jewish community. Yehuda: So let’s go back in time a little bit. I remember when the first piece of technology that kind of democratized Jewish knowledge, at least in my lifetime, not the Encyclopedia Judaica, obviously, the floppy discs that constituted the Bar Ilan Responsa Project, which became CDs and then thumb drives. And it was like, okay, you can have basically all of Jewish texts that they were able to put on those floppy drives or the thumb drives. David Zvi: Disk on key. Yehuda: Disk on key. That’s right. And it was very clear for a while that was a tool that benefited scholars more than it did lay people, because people kind of knew where they wanted to look, but you could kind of see the ways that it watered down a lot of teaching because you could tell when someone had just typed a keyword into Bar Ilan, it was like, now I’m teaching a class on this topic, and they didn’t even change the font of the printout of the sources that came there. Then phase two of that was Sefaria, right? The massive digitization and make publicly available Jewish texts that are out there. I don’t know. I find that to be like one of the most incredible technological accomplishments that we’ve seen as Jews, and it’s ripe for the same screwing up of authority, weakening of creativity, right, because. Now you can just, you know, copy anyone else’s source sheet or you can just get all the sources that you need, but it doesn’t help you think about how to make an argument, doesn’t require you to know the material, in the original, even—I say these words and I sound like a hopeless elitist. Where’s the boundary then, where you would say, when it comes to these technological advancements, when it comes to Jewish text, between the stuff that’s pretty good and the stuff that’s dangerously bad? David Zvi: Yeah, so to some degree there’s like to use AI parlance there’s a little bit of a moat still around folks who actually do know what they’re talking about. One of the known issues with using AI is that. You can’t easily tell when the AI is saying something crazy when you are beyond your own personal competency, right? There’s all these folks who believe that they’ve made breakthroughs in theoretical physics because they don’t actually know anything about physics, and they’re just talking to AI and you’re like, wow, you know, I have to tell someone about this. I think something similar happens with Jewish law, where you can get a lot, but it’s not everything. And like, in some ways, like I find the question a little bit frustrating because for a lot of technologies there is this instinct to think about like, well, what is the interface between that technology and halakha specifically, right? Because it’s practical, because it’s the training that so many Jews who go to Jewish day schools have. And halakha is important. But at the same time, I worry that it’s not the most useful frame for thinking about AI. There are more useful questions around AI in terms of humanity. What does it mean to be created in the image of God? What does it mean to value other human beings? Like that matters to me a lot more. The halakha piece is important and yeah, like I can imagine people like kind of coming up with crazy halakhic ideas as a result of AI, but I’m less concerned about it because I wanna see the other ways that Judaism can have an impact. And those are places where you’re not just trying to get an answer, you’re trying to like come up with like a new idea or a new image where I don’t see AI kind of slotting so easily into something that rabbis already do. There’s something like more complex going on there. Yehuda: The nature of this business that we’re in or that we’re adjacent to, Jewish leadership, rabbinic leadership, Jewish education, all of these things, is that by and large, some people are gonna be interested in the larger philosophical questions, and everybody’s gonna be concerned about whether we’re actually all gonna die. That’s legitimate for source of concern. No one has yet explained to me exactly how that happens, but I’m sure that there’s a plan. David Zvi: I think the folks who have it in mind are intentionally not talking about it because they know the AIs are listening. Yehuda: Really? David Zvi: Yeah. Yehuda: Okay. David Zvi: Yeah, a separate conversation. Yehuda: I think that we all crave basically some usable lane to think about how this implicates our lives and our choices. Like, forget about Halakha for a second. Think of, in the field of Jewish education, one of the things driving questions right now in Jewish education is how do you make this more affordable? People who want it are stuck. Schools can’t really market themselves to people who aren’t coming in yet because they don’t have the value proposition yet to be able to say, this is worth your spending $40,000 a year on it. You’re gonna see a gravitation towards AI technologies as like, oh, this is a really easy way for us to dramatically reduce costs if we can get all of these needs taken care of, if teachers can manage multiple classes through the use of these technologies. So I’m just using that as an example of like, yes, I wanna talk to you about the human condition. But that’s not where the conversation is going to live. For the vast majority of institutions, rabbis, the well-intentioned ones are gonna say, I wanna use this, not because it’s gonna write a better sermon than me, but because I could actually visit more sick people. I could do all the irreplaceable things that AI won’t be able to do yet until it has robots that I could actually uniquely contribute. And so I think that’s why we keep kind of gravitating towards what you called, like halakha questions, like questions of use and questions of policy. And in that sense, I’m kind of curious, like if that’s the playing field, do you have a sense already of recommendations that you give to either educational institutions you gave one rabbis should commit not to do this, but assuming that all of our fields are gonna use AI one way or the other. What’s the guidance that you offer to them in that space? David Zvi: Yeah, I’ll say two things. First on where the focus is gonna be. This is a constant problem with new technologies as well. One of my favorite responsa of all time is a rabbi in Cairo who’s being asked, can I use electricity on Shabbat? Can I use electricity on holidays? And he gives an answer, but before he answers, he says, you should know that I don’t really have time to answer this question, because like I have a job and these are hard questions. So like the fact that this lies outside the main responsibilities of most Jewish educators is like both totally understandable and also part of the reason why religious institutions struggle to provide the kind of larger ethical responses. Just the question of like where this actually fits in. There’s all kinds of efforts right now to see how AI slots into education and whether AI can replace teachers in whole are in part, I think the areas where this may be most successful are in mathematics and in language where there’s kind of like this rote thing, and also where if the AI can like gauge really, really well exactly what the student needs or like the right metaphor or the right exercises that can get ’em to the next point, maybe it can make that more efficient. Jewish education is both blessed and also burdened by this very heavy requirement to learn Hebrew, different modes of Hebrew, and I can imagine AI being used in some ways to speed up that process. At the same time, there is a kind of advantage to Jewish education in relation to AI that is different from other kinds of learning. So like if you’re thinking about prose writing, right? The ultimate point of prose writing is to make money, like not for, for most people. I mean, like, the ultimate point of like education is to have some kind of economic benefit, for, for most people. That’s why they go into the world and that’s why they, like, they go to college, to do those things. Now sometimes, you know, it happens more efficiently or in more roundabout ways, but they’re trying to get economic benefit and so like AI’s utility is clear. The point of learning Torah is not to make money. It’s supposed to be an end in itself. It’s supposed to be something that is enjoyable and absorbing and deep in itself. You can imagine AI kind of entering that not as a way of kind of like doing the Torah learning more efficiently. Like I get through the Tractate twice as fast as I would otherwise, but as a way to make a learning experience that feels more enriching and more enjoyable and more educational. I don’t know exactly what that looks like. Maybe it means like creating digital avatars of Maimonides and, you know, other rabbis, maybe it means, you know, just having some kind of interface where you can kind of like quickly ask questions so you don’t get stuck in the same way that you would otherwise. That’s the area where I’m most excited about, about seeing AI develop. I’m sure we’ll see tons of experiments about this stuff in the next few years. Yehuda: I’m gonna ask you two last questions, one more conceptual and then one more practical. The conceptual one is you wrote an essay, a kind of, I think the first major piece of Jewish thought, trying to kind of aggregate the state of the field a little bit. It’s on your website. And one of the things you said at the outset of the essay was, it’s hard to tell whether this is a case where it’s like, okay, I know exactly what Jewish texts I’m bringing to bear, right, to be able to determine this or whether we’re confronting something that’s totally new, and that whenever Jewish thinkers confront technology, there’s a tell, a little bit, by whichever text they use right away, ’cause it’s kind of disclosing what they think of the issue, right? Text by analogy. Are there obvious texts that you’re going to these days in thinking about AI that you would prescribe as a kind of Jewish study curriculum for people who are interested in thinking about this question? David Zvi: So I would say speaking really, really abstractly really, really broadly, that there is no Jewish perspective on AI. It does not exist as such and, and I think it’s important to say that, because otherwise what ends up happening is you end up in this endless search for like, let me find the text that is most similar to what ChatGPT put out yesterday. And that both takes a lot of time and also takes energy away from the work right now to think about what behaviors and practices are we trying to develop. It’s not that there’s nothing that’s relevant, but I think the basic assumption should be there’s not gonna be so much that you’re gonna find the work is on you. So to the degree that a Jewish approach to AI develops, it’s an approach that develops now that people are developing in practice. So in 50 years, maybe we can say like, we developed a Jewish approach to AI and that was amazing and that was really important. I hope we end up in that place, but I don’t think it’s quite there yet. In terms of the text that I do find useful for thinking about this, the one place where I think, or I’m noticing that, that Judaism seems to have something specific to say, is on the question of AI’s moral status and relationship to human beings. I see a lot of Christian denominations heading in the direction of, we care about biological humanity and not behavioral humanity, right? It matters if you have like a physical human heart. It doesn’t matter if you talk like a person. If you do not have a physical human heart, then I could treat you like, whatever. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter how you act. I would say that Jewish sources tend in a different direction. There seems to be an interest in deciding human behavior on the basis of, how does a being act, a being that seems humans sometimes get the status of a human or a demon that acts human is treated to some degree like a human. So I think those texts are helpful in developing some kind of Jewish approach. The other text that I think I’ve actually put on this podcast before, is from the brother of the Maharal of Prague, who’s one of the earliest opponents to the printing press, or at least for Jewish context, and, and one of the arguments he makes for why you shouldn’t use the printing press is he says, imagine a beggar who kind of comes to town and like borrows a bunch of stuff from a bunch of different people and you know, ends up being dressed in really nice clothes. As a result, a second beggar comes to town, sees the first beggar, and it’s like, oh, that guy is really wealthy. Goes to that first beggar and is like, can you give me some money? Can you give me some clothes? Not realizing that everything the first beggar has is actually just borrowed. So this is his way of talking about how a book, a physical book, is basically a kind of borrowing of the real wisdom, which is the wisdom of people. And if you learn from a book, then you are being deceived in some way because you are only getting a borrowing. You are borrowing from something that itself is borrowed. You can imagine AI kind of functioning similarly in that it gives you this impression of great depth, but that depth isn’t always there and that at the end of the day you actually do need to go back to people, to human beings. Yehuda: Last question, which is very practical, maybe annoyingly so, and I’m sure you get to ask this a lot, if you had three key suggestions to Jewish institutions that are trying to formulate an AI policy, I know that usually those questions are about proprietary work, right? The ethics of copyright law, things like that, and also probably wind up getting reduced to, are we gonna go with the pro suite of this company or that company. But if you were gonna say, here are three Jewish principles that you would wanna see Jewish institutions invest in or advance as part of their AI policies, a synagogue, a school, the Shalom Hartman Institute. What might those be? David Zvi: I’m gonna give you two. I’m not sure I can come over with three right now. Yehuda: That’s fine. We’ll get AI to dot he third David Zvi: Great. One is, value humans first, make sure that whatever you are doing does not result in the loss of human dignity, which can happen in really subtle ways, because when you have AI’s enter a system and do things that humans previously did, there is a, a way in which the AI does make people feel like they’re less than adequate, and I don’t think people should feel like that, even if sometimes they do need to change the work that they’re doing as a result. That’s one. So I would say the second one is have the conversation. A lot of people have come to AI with very different understandings of what should and should not be allowed. I think they often only realize in the room with each other how far apart they are on both the way they use AI and their assumptions about. How it should be used, and they’re also their own personal competence. I think there is sometimes a sense that it’s not worth having those conversations because people are just gonna do whatever they do anyways. And yeah, companies are gonna win at the end of the day, but it does actually make sense to have conversations internally about what do you feel comfortable with, what you do not feel comfortable with, because those conversations need to happen somewhere. And I think there’s always a sense that like, oh, someone else is doing that hard work. But the work happens best when it happens locally, and coming up with policies that you and the people you work with together feel good about, I think is probably the best way to go. It’s also a way of elevating folks who are younger in the organization, who often both have a clear experience with AI, use it more frequently, and also are more likely to be injured by AI development in terms of their own career prospects as they, you know, move up the career ladder. Yehuda: Has the added advantage of doing exactly that same thing that you described about doing, of elevating or valuing humans in the processes by engaging them in exactly the participatory process of figuring out where do they want their own work to begin and where do they want it to end. David Zvi, thanks for being on the show today. David Zvi: Thanks. Great to be here.