Praying Via ChatGPT

 

I was sent an Instagram reel. A person stands at what is clearly a Church dais, reading a prayer from their phone screen. They mispronounce the words, “filling our hearts,” as “filing our hearts” and continue to read, in steady sonorous tones, “Feel free to modify this prayer or tailor it to your specific needs and benefits.” They are reading the footer of the ChatGPT text in the same way they have read – what now seems clearly to be – a ChatGPT-written prayer.

Hmmmm.

Creating new liturgy is hard. I don’t do it. We are, as a community, fortunate to have David Djemal able to craft and recraft the prayer we share at New London for the captives as time passes horrendously. Sometimes, new prayers are necessary, but I’m grateful not to be called to create new prayers for every service. We locate our own ever-changing spiritual journey in dialogue with a, largely fixed liturgy. That is to say, the part of us that changes each and every day is allowed to be internal and intimate. We don’t force ourselves into explicitly expressing spiritual complexities that resist those of us who aren’t great poets.

 

Turning to a language model to replace our own struggles is, of course, the great new temptation of our age. It’s a tool, but it’s not … the Messiah. Our member, David Monis-Weston, who works in the field, shared one peer reviewed paper about  the effects of “metacognative laziness” arising in ChatGPT users. And another paper in which academics found, “convenience came at a cognitive cost, diminishing users' inclination to critically evaluate.” The Turing test – a computer imitating human patterns of communication so effectively as to be indistinguishable from a human – is behind us. It is to be replaced by a test that will not be subject to external academic oversight but will instead tempt and slip past most of us. Can we preserve our humanity when it is so much more “convenient” to outsource? My mind went to a run of Mishnayot in Kiddushin -  a frankly troubling and outdated run of Mishnayot - in which the Rabbis allow women entering a marriage with different-sized dowries to outsource some domestic tasks if they could afford to so do, but never the most important elements of being in an intimate relationship. The gendered nature of that specific list, of course, interests me not at all, but policing that which can and that which must not be outsourced when it comes to our engagement with our fellow humans and our Creator must become a central task for us all.

Bamakom ShAin Anashim Histadel Lehiyot Ish taught the first century leader of our people, Rabban Gamliel, ‘in a place where there is no humanity, strive to be human.’ Sometimes the old ones are the best ones. Still.