If there’s one thing I’m not, it’s an early adopter. Don’t get me wrong — I’m not a Luddite either. I enjoy and appreciate technological developments, though I often begin using them later than others do. We didn’t have color television, or for that matter a push button telephone, for our first 14 years of marriage until we moved to Teaneck in 1984. And I was still listening to vinyl records long after CDs took over the market, continued with CDs after they were replaced by Spotify, and didn’t get an iPod or iPhone until they were many versions in. Sure, I use social media, but as a baby boomer, I limit myself to Facebook; no Twitter (oops, X), Tik Tok, Instagram, or, God forbid, Truth Social. And I wasn’t much different as a lawyer, where for most of my career, even after WestLaw was available, my research platform (using my great-niece Tova’s language) was — gasp! — books.

It’s therefore not surprising that I haven’t used Artificial Intelligence very much. As a retired lawyer, I do, of course, understand AI’s benefits as a first step in legal research. I emphasize first step, though, because using it for final briefs has resulted in hundreds of embarrassing instances of attorneys relying on AI-invented hallucinated cases and quotes. I can’t fathom how, especially in an adversarial system where your, well, adversary is fine-combing your work to find even the smallest error to exploit, lawyers can submit arguments based on decisions they never read. In my briefs, I always read and cite-checked every case mentioned, as well as every word appearing between quotation marks. Failing to do so not only violates basic professional ethical standards, but also, especially in light of the now-current exorbitant billable hourly charges, constitutes theft of the fees paid by clients for such (non)work.

In my current non-legal life, however, I recently realized it was time to join the 2020s. So, just as I moved from (a) reading print books to (b) listening to books on tape through wired earbuds on a Walkman to (c) listening to audio books downloaded to my iPhone in seconds from library apps and streamed by Bluetooth through my hearing aids, I finally bit the bullet and tried AI. After first dipping my toes into the shallow end of the pool by asking for recommended treatments for spinal stenosis — this column was written before, but is being published after, my recent laminectomy — I dove into the deep end and twice prompted Google’s Gemini AI to write columns in the voice of Joseph C. Kaplan of the Jewish Standard about topics I carefully chose. The results were surprising, eerie, and scary.

The surprise was how good one of the two was. No, I didn’t think it was quite good enough, without a lot of additional writing and editing, to submit to the Jewish Standard over my name. But it told stories, both serious and humorous, as I am wont to do, had many Jewish — indeed even Modern Orthodox — references that are part and parcel of almost every column I write, and included plenty of dashes (like any good litigator) and contractions (never used by litigators), thus capturing the inherent contradiction of a (retired) litigator-columnist. Most importantly, it had my chatty tone, which, as I recently mentioned, is one that I work hard to infuse into my work, thus exhibiting a column voice that in certain sentences (the best ones if I may be so immodest) almost fooled even me.

(The second column wasn’t nearly as good; more like a compendium of paraphrases from previous “I’ve Been Thinking” columns rather than one, like the first, with completely new language written in my voice and style to make a point that echoes my world view.)

There were, unsurprisingly, errors. I haven’t been Joe(y) for many decades; it’s been Joseph since college. Likewise, my grandfathers and father were, to me and my children respectively, Zayde; I’m Grandpa. And one borderline hallucination crept in; a quote attributed to Rav Yehudah Ha-Nasi was either a serious misunderstanding of a classic teaching of his about the World-to-Come (b Avodah Zara 10b) or simply made up. Plus, there were none of the parenthetical citations to biblical or talmudic references that I often provide or hyperlinks to articles providing support for or additional information that are important to the point I’m trying to make.

But on the whole, it sounded, at least to Joseph Kaplan, close enough to Joseph Kaplan to be eerie.

Hence the surprise and eeriness. But why scary? Because it brought home to me in a personal way the debate I’ve been reading about whether AI eventually will replace humans. And so, as I read the first AI column, I uncomfortably wondered whether at some future time someone like me — either the former lawyer or the current columnist — will be relegated to their recliner while AI spits out in seconds the briefs and columns I slaved over for a large part of my life.

And that may well be the case in some aspects of litigation; basic initial legal research, digesting depositions, and document production quickly come to mind. But AI is backward looking, creating new content from learned patterns in massive data sets already in existence. Creating something new (and true), however, based on something from within a person and not on the past, is beyond the ken of AI. It’s something only humans can do.

Thus, AI did a pretty good job writing a column in my style, based on all my previous ones. But every once in a while, I decide to exercise my free will (bechirah chafshit) and use a very different style or do something I’ve never done — indeed, never even thought of — previously; something not based on my past data set of columns but emanating from my inherent, very human creativity, from somewhere deep inside me. AI, bound by the past and not having access to personal choice or creativity, cannot do that.

The Rav, our teacher Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, touches upon this idea in two of his most famous works, though not, of course, in the context of AI. In his majestic essay, “The Lonely Man of Faith,” the Rav brilliantly differentiates between the Adam in the first creation story in chapter 1 of Genesis, whom the Rav calls Adam the first, and Adam the second in Chapter 2’s creation story. Adam the first was created b’tzelem Elokim, in the image of God, which, the Rav writes, “refers to man’s charismatic endowment as a creative being. Man’s likeness to God expresses itself in man’s striving and ability to become a creator.” Indeed, “[h]e is also a creative aesthete . . .[who] fashions ideas with his mind, and beauty with his heart.”

The Rav also discusses creativity, this time in relation to halakha, in his magnum opus, “Halakhic Man.” There, he speaks about ḥiddush, “[t]he power of creative interpretation,” which “extends as well into the practical domain, into the real world.” Being created in the image of God, as Adam the first was, means to be “a partner of the Almighty in the act of creation, man as creator of worlds.” (All translations of Halakhic Man are by my brother, Prof. Lawrence J. Kaplan) This very human creativity, buried deep within our DNA and not in our data sets, is one of the things that makes us what we are. AI, with all its impressive abilities, lacks that Divine partnership and creativity.

I’m 79 — my birthday, like my surgery, fell between this column’s writing and its publication — so I don’t have to be worried personally about being replaced by AI. But I believe that as the Torah teaches, people are the ones who have the ability to fulfill God’s mandate to Adam the first to fill the earth and subdue it (Gen. 1:28). I am also inspired by the ending of the talmudic story of the oven of akhnai (b BM 59b) where we’re told that when the rabbis rejected a Divine heavenly voice stating what the law should be, the “Holy One, Blessed be He … smiled and said ‘my children have triumphed over me.’”

And so, as I worry about the future, I am uplifted by looking at my children and grandchildren and seeing within them an innate human creativity emanating from their spark of the Divine — attributes that AI has not duplicated. Yes, it’s a scary brave new world in which we live, but if we have the power to subdue the earth, indeed even the possibility of triumphing over God, no tiny computer chip, not even millions of highly sophisticated ones working together, can defeat us.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)