A fatwa against AI.

Writing from Morroco

One of my favorite things about traveling to places I have never been before is delving into a new culture. I had the oppurtunity to take a two day stopover in Morroco, a country and people I have heard much about but have never gotten the chance to experience in person. Morroco is a muslim country and as such many of its general customs are similar to that of other muslim nations. They, as a nation celebrate the major muslim holidays, shops are closed or have very limited hours on al-Jumuʿah (the friday edition of shabbos), and from just taking a short walk or a peek into a clothing store(see picture below) you are unmistakably in a country that is under the cultural sway of Islam.

One of the things I like to do in the morning of being in a new foreign country is try and read some of the local news to get a taste of what matters here. Unfortunately I couldnt find a physical english lnguage Morrocon newspaper so my laptop would have to suffice. I ended up finding an article discussing briefly the king of morrocos stance on muslim fatwas, which in short are a public proclomation issued by a group of faqihs (basically muslim rabbis) on a particular question. The article was intresting because it described how the king of morroco urged the groups of faqihs to try and take the moderate approach when issuing fatwas and excersie prudence to take into account all members of Islam. So why did this intrest me in the slightest?

Well, it reminded me of what we will for the sake of irony call “a fatwa against artificial inteligence” or as the venerable Yeshiva World News writes in its article, a “kol koreh” signed by over two dozen Roshei Yeshiva and Gedolim effectively banning the use of artificial inteligence (even in cases of business use). Some of the reasons listed in the ban: It(AI) has an enourmous power to attract a person to the views of goyim, kefirus, araios, and it removes a man from the world. Here is a link to the article and ban in full.

The terminology used in the ban suggests that a major halachic and moral issue has now cropped up due to the creation and prolifration of AI. Well seems from the signed ban that AI has been created to dehumanize us and lead us all off the derech. How exactly does AI plan on doing this? Well you’ll have to wait because the matter is “unclear at this moment”. Here is the second problem, the issues outlined in the ban either exist in massive amounts on the web already, think pornography, atheism, and all other sorts of things we are unintrested in having in our homes and even more intrestingly the issues that have been listed seem to have been pre-accounted for by OpenAI!

Using OpenAIs Chat-GPT and Dall-E text and image generators as examples, let us try to formulate a prompt that would create text or image that fits the description of the ban. Here is my best attempt at trying to get Chat-GPT to get me to leave Yiddishkeit. Trying to get Chat-GPT to write a dirty story. Here are pictures of a “pretty girl” on Dall-E. Trying to search for any explicit terms on DALL-E will lead you here.

I think we can safely assume that if any of Chat-GPTs arguments are uprooting our belief in Judaism there may need to be other areas of yidishkeit necessary for us to focus on. Chat-GPT, mainly because of all the regulatory scrutiny AI has recieved is proboably the most halchicly safe way to access the informational internet and once fully interoperable with the web the argument could be made that it should be your primary way to interface with the internet. The pictures that DALLE conjured up are about the same level salacious as walking down any major street in America, possibly cleaner.

If our assumptions are correct than what could possibly be the explanation:

A.The Rabbonim who signed this document were given a blank piece of paper and some individual in the jewish community with a vandetta against OpenAI wrote the rest of it.

B.The Rabbonim, due to being involved in klei kodesh most of there time are not as well versed in the constantly updating world of generative artificial inteligence as they are with the ketzos in yevamos.

C.The individual who went around to the Gedolim and Rabonim became the sole provider of information about generative AI to them and therefore because of the lack of information or misinformation furnished, the signatures and kol koreh are not actually against Chat-GPT or DALL-E but a fictional version of these models that does include X-rated content or the most powerful and lucid arguments against frumkeit.

I would estimate the reality is partially B that ends up leading to C occuring.

We now have a risk of a repeat “Internet ban” debacle (which is still going on at some level in Chasidishe circles) which lasted several long years. That saw ban after ban after ban after ban after ban by every major gadol, rov, and rosh yeshiva and basically culminated in an asifa that proclaimed…..“you can use it for business with a filter”. Now, for many frum jews around the world, the internet not only is a source of income , but has lead to one of the greatest revolutions in worldwide Torah study. Frum entertainment as well has moved (or stayed) online ,newspapers, podcasts, kosher movies…the list goes on.

Needless to say, the ban was wholly inefective and we as a group found solutions to help integrate the modern world’s innovation into a torah-true Jewish society. Companies such as TAG and WebChaver were built to help defend against the most menacing parts of the internet, and today filters are ubiquitous in most frum households. I would argue that if we were more future oriented we could have provented much of the damage caused by the internet by embracing it even earlier. Imagining an alternate universe where that origional ban on the internet was effective in completely shutting down the frum world from the power of the internet and you are not imagining a better frum world.

We know that AI is her to stay. What a shame it would be for our us to be cut off from the ability to harness the power of AI for the needs of our community. Whenever a new technology has entered the world, we have always tried to understand it and thoughtfully propose solutions to whatever issues may arise, AI should be no different. I will leave off with a qoute from a letter that Reb Shamshon Rephael Hirsh wrote for his kehillah:

"Neither should you lend your ears to those that alienate themselves from life and science, believing that Judaism must fear them as its worst enemies. They are mistaken in believing that Judaism and all that is holy to it can only be saved by shutting off the sanctuary of Israel within its four walls and by locking the door against any gust of the fresh wind of life, or any beam of the light of science.”

Postscript,

This was not meant to be my first post, but it was something that caught my attention and I thought fit the bill for this substack , so I went for it. In the future I hope to cover more topics about the frum world in America and Israel, a full series on Collected Writings of R.S.R.H. and Torah Im Derech Eretz, and some deeper dives into Jewish history. If you find any of these topics intresting feel free to subscribe for free below and share with a friend.

The main reason I decided to start this substack is to help clarify my thoughts on paper. I dont claim to be an authority on any matter, and mistakes are bound to be made. Please feel free to comment and correct me if you see something you feel is incorrect.

Sidepoints.

1. See Halacha Headlies podcast: After the BAN-Revisiting AI for some attempts to back up the ban.

2. There is also some good writing to be done on what Israel would look like today if it had a religious soft monarchy, such as Morroco does. And who would lead it? Who can?

3. And, yes obviously generative AI will be used to produce X-rated content the point being made is there is already a strict wall between the two unlike the open internet.

4. There is an intresting Halachic discussion in general about coercion, and if and when coercion is a viable option for us to use when Halachah is not being followed.