Q&A: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and Judaism in General
Artificial Intelligence and the Future of the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and Judaism in General.
Question
I saw that people have already asked you about the impact of artificial intelligence in the near future.
Do you think that because of artificial intelligence, the social sciences and the humanities are destined to disappear? And will there still be a need in the future for rabbis and halakhic decisors? (For example, already now GPT answers Jewish law questions for me with almost exact sources.) In general, artificial intelligence has many implications for a wide range of halakhic issues.
I’d be happy to hear your opinion.
Answer
I didn’t understand why you’re asking specifically about the humanities and the social sciences, or about Jewish law. What about the natural sciences and mathematics, and certainly computer programming? As I understand it, artificial intelligence software is far more suited to those fields.
In short, this is a general question that involves speculation about the future, so I don’t have any particular added value to offer on it.
Discussion on Answer
The problem of making up sources is very serious (this is called hallucinations). One solution is to require it to check every source online before citing it. That often works, because its conclusions usually aren’t far from the truth (it derives them from non-primary sources); it just documents them with nonexistent primary sources.
I also used it for a Jewish law question, and it gave me a detailed answer with medieval authorities (Rishonim) and later authorities (Acharonim). When I got home I opened the sources and discovered that it had completely made things up; in the best-case scenario, the source was only vaguely related to the topic. On the other hand, it’s strong at text analysis and editing.