I asked AI Sigmund Freud to interpret my dream this morning. All I got was some dancing dots, as if a) the great man had fallen asleep or b) my dream had broken his virtual brain.

Freud is one of nine historical Jewish figures featured in “Ask Jewish Lives,” a new AI feature based on the biographies published in the Yale University Press “Jewish Lives” series. The free website also allows you to “chat” with Albert Einstein, Emma Goldman, Baruch Spinoza, Theodor Herzl, Hadassah founder Henrietta Szold, the Talmud sage Akiva, Justice Louis D. Brandeis and the prophet Elijah. 

Jewish Lives says the site is designed to “enrich reader exploration of the Jewish experience.” They’ve created lesson plans to help educators use Ask Jewish Lives in high school and university classrooms.

“We wanted to extend the life of the books, to use AI to explore Jewish history and biography in a new way,” Rebecca Keys, managing director of Jewish Lives, told me. 

Keys explained that the answers are based only on the various biographies, with various “guardrails” put in place to keep the chatbot from hallucinating. 

I played around with it for a bit and found it to be a useful research tool if you are looking for some fast, coherent and footnoted answers to questions about the subjects. Because it has become the topic du jour, I asked “Szold” and “Einstein” about their conceptions of Zionism. Where did they fall on the spectrum between supporting Israel as a nation-state of the Jews, and Israel as a Jewish homeland sharing territory and governance with its Palestinian neighbors? 

I knew that both Szold and Einstein, products of the first half of the 20th century, held complicated views on these questions, and wanted to see how the bot handled them. “Szold” spoke about........

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