What If, with AI

I decided to do some role playing with AI.

I pretended that my blog showed up in an internet search, and that I was curious what the blog was about, a dirty underhanded trick, if you ask me. I mean, it's my blog.

"My search engine recently coughed up a blog called 'The Rabbi's Rowboat,' I began. "What should I expect to find there?"

"You can expect to find Jewish humor, parables, and spiritual life lessons wrapped in maritime metaphors," it said, 1.3 seconds later. "You will likely find personal reflections on 'rowing through life's currents.'"

Maritime metaphors? OK, three out of four, not bad. I gave it a C.

Then, out of the blue, AI accused me of spookery. "A blog with this title," it said, "heavily channels traditional comedic tropes." That's it, straight up, without so much as a witch trial, the blog is a devil child born of a candle-lit seance in the basement. 

Oy vey.

I was instructed to take a deep breath.

First of all, I thought, the alleged channeling here concerns, not a spirit, but a book; namely, Three Rabbis in a Rowboat: The World's Best Jewish Humor, condescendingly called later by AI "a decades-old, out-of-print humor compilation," a slight that doesn't exactly flatter the medium's channeling skills, does it?

Second, a seance channeling comedic tropes, especially the world's best Jewish humor, even if old and out of print, coupled with a few inexpensive Costco Connection party-planning ideas, might just make for a successful evening event with family and friends (Hello, Groucho, can you hear us?).

And, finally, to be fair, AI never really used the term seance. Channeling, after all, might simply refer to the blogger's regular, everyday divine inspiration.

Later, when informed of the blog's menu items (listed above), AI revised its assessment, paying particular attention, like many of us, to Rabbi Nachman.

"Rabbi Nachman of Breslov famously spoke about life as a narrow, unstable bridge where the absolute rule is to have no fear at all," it said. "A rowboat in a storm requires that you sit still, face the waves, and keep rowing without jumping overboard, an active metaphor for our small, personal efforts to stay afloat on the turbulent waters of modern life."

I was tempted to ask AI if it knew how to swim. 

But I'd been triggered, transported via flashback to high school English class, listening to a classmate drone on about Shakespeare in an oral report. 

"So we see," the student was saying, "that Hamlet’s inner psyche is like a fragile vessel tossed upon a sea of intrigue; that his angst-ridden cry, 'To be or not to be,' is indeed our cry, the very call of the human predicament, which is, whether or not to let ourselves be capsized by alienation and despair, that we all must either weather the storms of life, or be forever lost, to the existential abyss. Thank you."

For me, there was another option. Sit on a bench at the end of the dock, and send AI sailing into the sunset, wrapped in its own maritime metaphors.

For closure, I should confess that, it's true, heavily channeling was involved in creating this blog. I was channeling "Row, Row, Row Your Boat," an old campfire song. 

Nothing more, nothing less.