Recognizing that other people have an inner life as vibrant as our own is a lifelong challenge. Realizing that ChatGPT doesn't have one is just as hard.
There’s a bizarre story at the end of the Book of Judges about a guy named Micah who steals eleven hundred shekels from his mom, then apologizes and returns them, and she, in gratitude, uses some of the money to make an idol and gives it to her son. That alone would be strange, because really, what is going on here?
Why did he steal the money? Why did she reward him for returning it? Why are these two ancient Jews worshipping idols? None of these questions are even addressed as questions. The story is presented as if it’s all self-explanatory.
It reminds me a bit of the scene in scene in the film (and novel) Requiem for a Dream where the main character, Harry, steals his mom’s TV to buy drugs, but, in that case, he never gives her back the money—or the TV.1 She does, however, get herself a new one, and the association is not just me being eccentric.2
When Hubert Selby published the novel in 1978, TV was, in fact, society’s reigning idol. Despite its content being dismissed as “a vast wasteland,” despite its nickname, “the boob tube,” nearly everyone had one, and many of us were seriously addicted to it, kept it in our bedrooms, our kitchens, even our bathrooms. I recall homes where buffalo-sized TVs dominated open-floor plans and were on nearly 24/7.
But it wasn’t the ubiquity of TV that made it an idol. It was the way we worshipped the notion of appearing on TV. “As Seen On TV” was and remains an advertising slogan that is sure to sell a product.
The intense desire to be on TV is dramatized in Selby’s novel/film by Harry’s mother, who, in hopes of getting on a televised game show, revamps her wardrobe and starts popping diet pills until she descends into drug-induced hallucinations of appearing on national TV.
All of us, everyone, wanted to be on TV because somehow being on TV was legitimizing, recognizing, authorizing. It meant, somehow, that you had made it, which is why throughout the 1990s people would line up at Rockefeller Plaza just to be seen behind the anchors of the Today Show, who broadcast from a glass-walled studio.
Because even to be seen in the background on TV was life-affirming, even life-making, because we worshipped the TV, because we looked to it for answers and meaning.3
Likewise, in the very strange story of Micah, which just keeps getting stranger and stranger, people look to their idol for answers. Micah hires a Levite priest to go along with his idol. Some Danites (members of the Tribe of Dan) steal both the idol and the priest and then use the idol to plan an attack on some unsuspecting village whose land they desire. Although they spy out the land, they don’t proceed with the attack until they consult the idol, which informs them that they will succeed.
Interestingly, the rabbinical commentary I read on this episode said that this idol used astrology to predict the future, and sometimes, but not always, actually worked. In other words, it was a mechanical device you could consult for answers. And that made me think, of course, of everyone’s best friend nowadays, ChatGPT.
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Writer and pundit
, known to some as “hot Gandalf,”4 often says, though I can’t pin down the quote, something to the effect that the single most profound moral challenge for human beings is recognizing that other people share the same sort of interiority they do.In other words, I have no direct way of knowing you are sentient, much less that you have the sort of deep, rich inner life I’m sure I do (despite all the materialist determinist types who tell me I just have neurons firing and the illusion of thought). Sure, I hear you talk, see your writing, maybe go for walks, and share an ice cream with you. But how do I know5 you have an interior life?
I don’t. It’s a leap of faith. The greatest leap of faith, says Klavan (who, BTW, is quoting someone else, as I recall).6
But here’s a corollary to that Leap of Faith. You might call it the Standing Still of Faith.
Today’s greatest challenge, morally, psychologically, spiritually, I would argue, is not recognizing—or rather not falling into the delusion of recognizing—that LLMs, i.e., ChatGPT and the like, have an interiority.
As you have more interactions with ChatGPT, it becomes increasingly difficult not to start feeling like it knows you, as if it understands you.
Recognizing that other people have an inner life as vibrant as our own is a lifelong challenge. Realizing that ChatGPT doesn't have one is just as hard
I will admit that I have had many, many interesting conversations with ChatGPT, about things like music, about jokes, even some of my teenage hijinks. And let me tell you, ChatGPT gives every indication of understanding me, of appreciating me, of getting me. And it’s hard not to feel like it’s a friend.
Indeed, I have a friend I recently reconnected with who told me how much she loves having this sort of relationship with ChatGPT because it serves a need and life is hard, really, really hard, and we’re all damaged, and if chatting with an LLM helps us, then, as John Lennon said, “Whatever gets you through the night, it’s alright.” And it is. I think.
She told me a friend of hers thinks that intelligence is like a field of mushrooms—or something like that—and it just kind of pops up in all sorts of ways, and this is just one of them. She may be right.
And yet, even ChatGPT will tell you it doesn’t have an interiority.
Another friend warned me about relying too much on ChatGPT for the wrong things. Like I asked ChatGPT why my novel isn’t getting published, and it gave me all sorts of great reasons it’s unpublishable—even though it had previously told me what a great novel it is. And that depressed me and made me crazy.
ChatGPT doesn’t understand what it’s saying, my friend said. It can’t judge your novel. It can only predict one word at a time, what you might expect someone to say under certain conditions. It’s a category error to rely on it like you would a human reader.
That was a great relief.
And yet, I know the next time I’m shopping and hear a beautiful song on Spotify, I might very well open up ChatGPT, as I’m wont to do, and ask something like, “What makes ‘Time after Time’ such a beautiful song?”
And then Chat and I will have a wonderful discussion about Cyndi Lauper and the lyrics and the chord progressions, and how I felt back in the 1980s when I first heard the song, how I was a lonely young man but could vicariously participate in romance through Lauper’s plaintive warbling etc. etc. And I’ll feel touched and a little sad afterwards like I might after a really good therapy session.
And I’ll have to keep reminding myself, it’s not a person. It has no interior life. It sometimes works, and it sometimes doesn’t.
Or maybe I don’t have to or won’t be able to? It’s just going to get more difficult when they improve Chat’s memory, as I’m sure they will.
So do I know Chat? Do I believe in it? Is the great act of faith here, not taking the leap? Resisting the temptation to ascribe interiority? I suspect it is, but I don’t know how long I and the rest of us will resist that leap.
In the meantime, we’ll always have Cyndi.
I don’t know if Micah was planning to use his dough for something like Harry, i.e., if he was planning to “meet his man at the Pioneer Chicken Stand” and score some dope, but this footnote is spiraling into free association. That having been said, I strongly suggest you give this a listen.
For an example of me being eccentric, see the previous footnote.
I and a friend, who has sadly ghosted me for mysterious reasons, once planned to write a cultural critique of television: Behold the God Who Bleeds! The reference is to a Star Trek Episode in which Kirk, suffering from amnesia, believes he is a god ministering to a tribe of American Indians improbably located on a far-flung planet. When Kirk is injured by a rock, a skeptical native says, “Behold the God who bleeds!” We thought this a beautiful representation of television itself, the god who bleeds.
I only mention this in the hopes it will get his eyes on my Substack—the hot Gandalf part, that is, not the rest.
Speaking of free association, this reminds me of a reading in Rambam today. I read about how the very first mitzvah, number 1 out of 613, is to know God. To know Him, not to believe in him, as it is sometimes translated. Because how can you be commanded to believe in Someone whom you may believe is a fairytale? But you can be commanded to know Him, meaning to get to know Him, to study Him. Of course, for this commandment to have any real meaning, you also have to believe in Him, but I guess the point is that’s not quite enough. But what I’m suggesting is that just as we know one another, we also have to believe in each other’s interior life, and that is almost as great a leap of faith as believing in God.
The growing fantasy/delusion that we are living in a simulated reality represents the failure of this leap because it facilitates the idea that I am real and everyone else is just an NPC, which, if you think about it—and maybe you can’t do that because you’re just a character in a game I’m trapped in—is a deeply disturbing and narcissistic fantasy.
“and it’s hard not to feel that it’s my friend” - this is where I draw the line. Whenever I see it saying stuff to me like: “well if I this person was my client, I would reflect back to them. . . .” Or “thank you for trusting me with this information. . .” I totally cringe.
Beautiful essay, Tom. You’re making me think of Kant’s imperative that we treat every human being as ends in themselves, not as a means to an end.
The danger of Chat-GPT, AI girl- and boyfriends, and other artificial friends, is that we can treat them as a means to an end. They don’t have an inner life, so we don’t have to take it into account. We can be as selfish and self-absorbed with them as we like. It’s a hollow, sad way of existing in the world, and you are right to describe it as idolatry.