Dead men don’t prompt

My wife wasn’t impressed. Not for the first time, she was concerned about something I was “putting out there”. To be fair, what I said was a little weird, but there was enough of a back-story to justify my “poor” choices. 

This is how I came to disappoint her. 

I have noticed, increasingly, that at function after function, the speeches sound the same. People who used to be delightfully illiterate, who couldn’t string a coherent sentence together, are now publicly describing their feelings and gratitude for the mother-in-law as though they sat at the feet of Wordsworth himself, drinking from his poetic juices. People who were unable to distinguish syntax from sin tax are now able to structure their toast to the lovely couple without offending anyone. 

It’s boring beyond words. Possibly because of them. 

Worse is that where I used to enjoy the speeches at events and learn something about the family, the speakers, and the celebrant, the intrigue is now limited to which Artificial Intelligence (AI) platform they used. 

And that, in a nutshell, is why I came to ask ChatGPT to write my obituary, based on what it knows about me. 

My wife felt that this crossed a line. Not because it was morbid, but because apparently there are still limits to what normal people ask robots to do for them. 

What “Chat” produced was both hilarious and deeply unsettling. Not because it was wrong. But because it was right. Painfully so. 

It described me as dying after “a brief but courageous battle with a mildly suspicious pain” that I had self-diagnosed online as either dehydration, a pinched nerve, or “a rare Scandinavian blood disorder previously only seen in reindeer”. Which, frankly, is not entirely impossible. 

Then came the real blow. ChatGPT observed that I had built a career out of asking difficult questions while simultaneously refusing to answer simple ones like “What do you want for dinner?” and “Have you booked the flights yet?” 

Judaism, interestingly, has always understood the danger of reducing a person to a simplified version of themselves. We are never only one thing. We are contradictions. We are holy and petty. Profound and ridiculous. Capable of wisdom in one moment and arguing about parking in the next. 

King David wrote psalms powerful enough to survive 3 000 years, yet his life is a masterclass in human complexity. Moshe leads a nation but loses patience. Yaakov becomes Israel while still limping from the struggle. The Torah presents people as human. 

AI is the very antithesis of this. Although we imagine that the danger is that machines will become human, increasingly it’s that the humans are becoming data. AI is fundamentally a pattern-recognition machine. It takes thousands of fragments and builds a coherent narrative, patterns, preferences, and search histories. The result? Sameness. Perfection. Structure and deathly dull wedding speeches. 

Still, even my wife would have to admit that my ChatGPT obituary was excellent. Sharp. Funny. Uncomfortably observant. 

Which raises a horrifying possibility. At my funeral – in 120-minus-my-age years – there may come a moment when somebody stands up to speak emotionally about my life, my impact, and my legacy. And there is a good chance that in the back row somebody else may quietly whisper, “Ja, not bad, but ChatGPT’s version was better.”