What Do Jewish Texts Say About Artificial Intelligence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) has exploded in usage, with 2025 estimates placing AI usage at 66% for the general population, or 92% for students, and headlines featuring prominent AI blunders such as the lawyers who used AI and subsequently presented fake case law that AI had hallucinated. AI has become a controversial cultural discussion in which proponents laud it as the future of technology, while opponents have highlighted the drawbacks of AI usage with respect to critical thinking, job market losses, and environmental implications. So how can AI be considered through a Jewish lens, and with Jewish values in mind?

To start, it’s worth returning to an age-old rabbinical debate in the Talmud about whether study or action is more important in Judaism. There are two courses of thought in this debate: the first is that study is superior to action because study leads to action. The second is that action is more important because it prioritizes the end goal more efficiently. Instead of doing a roundabout path to changemaking, action directly leads to change. Applied to the debate of AI, this debate highlights a fallacy of the technology. Many proponents and common users of AI cite the fact that it is able to more efficiently summarize complicated texts, point out flaws in arguments, or even resolve the puzzling mysteries of how to text someone back after a first date. Many people see AI, in effect, as prioritizing action. The longer route of learning, of wading through complex language independently or muddling through social nuances, by comparison, is painful and slow. AI creates action with ease, a tangible difference in time or effort that people can then notice and invest elsewhere. 

But returning to the Talmudic debate, there becomes a reason that learning is ultimately considered to surpass action: because without learning, we will not know how to act. When one outsources work—from intellectual stimulation to emotional labor—one also sacrifices the opportunities that arise from these efforts to grow and change as a person. The action no longer comes through personhood, but rather through an AI, something that is separate from each and every one of us. That is not to issue a resounding rebuke of AI usage, but instead to highlight the ways in which Jewish theory might caution a blanket usage of AI across applications. In using AI, we create distance between ourselves and a path of learning. A text message sent to a date written by AI does not teach us how to convey ourselves to new romantic interests, but it separates us from the pain of learning that perhaps someone else didn’t find that date went so well after all. A paper submitted by AI separates us from intimately understanding the content that a paper composed over hours and hours provides.

When I think about this issue of AI, I often return to some of my most challenging learning experiences. Times that I wrote an essay I cherished only to receive hefty constructive criticism. Times I composed what felt like the best first draft of a blog post, something that surely knocked it out of the park, and yet ultimately came with a polite “Maybe you should take another go at this.” Anyone who has ever created anything, from writing a text to baking a cake to even building a sandcastle as a child, knows this feeling, the sinking disappointment for something not turning out exactly as planned. This feeling is painful, yes, but it is also a core teacher to guide learning, a gift that feels unpleasant in the moment yet serves to invest in future knowledge and skill development. While AI might make action easier and this feeling more avoidable, its usage cannot wholly replace either, and I often wonder if it sets people up for more disappointment later on, when finally experiencing learning at its messiest. 

Indeed, the process of learning—with all its warts and flaws—is often highly valued within Judaism. The Torah, as a holy book within Judaism, has fostered debate for thousands of years, including in the Talmud and other published commentary texts. Each generation of Jewish thinkers has attempted to learn, to grapple, to understand, and to advance our relationship with Judaism. But there is never any end to the action. Learning within Judaism continues as a process of debate, and is maintained through active engagement rather than passive offloading. Sure, it is entirely possible to ask any AI engine its perspective on anything in the Torah, or how to apply the Torah in a specific way. But doing so and declaring something as a finished action rather than applying values through process and over time sidesteps a cultural and historical responsibility. I still remember when, for my bat mitzvah, I delivered a dvar Torah. Was it the best or most insightful perspective that had ever been offered on my Torah portion? Probably not. I was young, and generations of Jews before me had pored over the same text with more time than I had to prepare. But it was also a perspective that was mine, a snapshot in time of who I was and what I believed that, if written by AI, would mean nothing to me now and would not be a part of my own story of learning the way that it indeed is. 

It is difficult in a world where we live with constant reminders of global suffering—of those who have more than us, and of the uncertainty of the future—to not to disengage with some tasks. And AI presents the opportunity to do that. Such disengagement is also not necessarily bad nor worthy of judgment: We are all trying to survive in a difficult time. Free will is central to Judaism, and with it, the right to choose whether and how to interact with technologies such as AI. Just as debates continue for centuries within Jewish thinking, this offers one perspective on applying such thought that could equally be countered by another religious expert. But considering AI usage, how it interacts with Jewish values of learning, chesed, or even tikkun olam, I see ample space for a consistent self-reflection of what we lose of ourselves when we outsource work, something that cannot be broadly answered but must be instead consistently considered and applied carefully.