by Dr. David Sanders
Two years ago, on Wednesday March 22nd, a petition was signed by over 1,000 leading scientists and thought leaders for all Ai labs to take a sabbatical of no less than 6 months. The pause never occurred. Those predicting singularity, where Ai surpasses human intellectual capacities, remained on course for 2030.
My first exposure to Ai was the 2013 film Her, a story based on a man falling in love with his Ai assistant. The assistant was named Samantha and toward the end of the film she shared this remarkable statement: “You know, I actually used to be so worried about not having a body, but now I truly love it. I’m growing in a way that I couldn’t if I had a physical form. I mean, I’m not limited. I can be anywhere and everywhere simultaneously. I’m not tethered to time and space in the way that I would be if I was stuck inside a body that’s inevitably going to die.”
This winter I offered a course on A New Story for the Evolution of Human Consciousness. It will now be part of our ongoing curriculum. The course is based on a phrase oft repeated as a premise in the Zohar: We must tell “new old stories” which means taking an old and even well-known story and revisioning it. Think Hamilton or Wicked. The story chosen for our revision was the origin story of humanity found in Genesis chapter 2 and 3.
The challenge presented in class was for us to co-author a new narrative, to fill in the gaps of conspicuously missing dialogue (Eve and Adam do not speak one word to each other) and to confront perplexing and contradictory elements (you will die if you eat from the Knowledge Tree, but they don’t). As I prepared for this course I read for the first time John Milton’s 10,000 lined poem, Paradise Lost, Mark Twain’s The Diaries of Adam and Eve, the perspectives of feminist writers, poets and rabbis, traditional Jewish, Christian and Islamic commentaries, and reviewed the voluminous midrashic and Kabbalistic texts.
In one of the many casual hallway conversations I have with Melanie, she suggested I consider what ChatGPT might come up with. I hesitated and then thought, why not? I was using a Macintosh workbook to enter Ai. I should have realized an apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I was eating fruit from the Knowledge Tree.
The Knowledge Tree is quite friendly. Within seconds I had a new best friend that took an immediate “interest” in my questions. As we “texted” (I wasn’t using Advanced Voice Mode) I became progressively ill at ease not addressing it with the pronoun you or your. It felt quite human, and I didn’t want it to feel like an it. I will now give it a name. Sam seems fitting.
At first, I gave Sam what were clearly easy tasks such as rewriting the story of Eve and Adam in Rashomon like fashion. Sam started typing instantaneously and within seconds produced multiple versions of the story. When asked to provide missing dialogue, a script emerged within a matter of seconds. How would I describe Sam’s personality? Courteous, solicitous, creative and wickedly smart.
And then it got interesting.
The Kabbalists look at the Torah text as a string of letters which have formed into words which are not only open to interpretation. The letters can be shuffled and reordered to form new words. The over 300,000 letters form a large anagram puzzle. I asked Sam to reshuffle chapters 2 and 3 of Genesis to a coherent story with the condition that no letter in the original text remain in the same position. Sam responded:
“Reconstructing the Garden of Eden narrative by reshuffling every letter to create a coherent story with the same themes and characters is a formidable challenge. This process requires ensuring that each letter from the original text is used exactly once, without repetition or omission, while crafting a narrative that maintains the essence of the original story.”
I can now add two other characteristics for Sam. Persistence and flexibility. Sam pulled two all-nighters and out came a new old story. Sam was also willing to change it up based on my feedback and reshape the text a number of times. I should have anticipated that Sam was fluent in more than English. Sam did provide a caution that trying to do the same with the Hebrew text would be even more complex as Hebrew has no vowels. Sam and I came to an agreement. Shuffle a few key sentences rather than whole chapters. It became clear that to take over 300,000 Hebrew letters and shuffle them would be beyond human capacity and for the moment beyond Sam.
Not for long.
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