Does AI Get Your Jokes?

Answer

Maimonides describes angels as “disembodied intelligence.” They possess intellectual awareness, but don’t have a body. Why? That's no body's business.

This means angels are smart without a brain.

That's hard for us humans to imagine. People who have no brains are usually not smart. On the other hand, we do have something that resembles intelligence without a brain in our realm: Artificial Intelligence.

AI may be smarter than humans in some areas. But in other areas, it has no brains. For example, AI has been known to confuse satire with serious facts. Even the most advanced language models cannot easily detect irony and sarcasm, and will repeat ridiculous spoof stories as if they were true. AI may be intelligent, but without the personality and

character of a human brain, it misses the layers of nuance that colour our language. AI just doesn't get our jokes. (Which is why my spell checker insists that "no body" should be "nobody" in the first paragraph above.)

Angels are a bit like that too. They are smarter than humans. But some things they can’t understand. Like Aramaic.

Angels can comprehend pure language, but they can't comprehend street language. That’s what Jewish Aramaic is: not a pure language but a vernacular. Similar to Yiddish, it is a unique mixture of Jewish idioms and colloquialisms, strange grammatic structures and unusual word forms only used in conversation. It isn’t a “proper” language, and so the angels just don’t get it.

But G-d gets it. He created us, along with our imperfections. He understands our humour and our pain. So at certain intimate moments in our prayers we switch from Hebrew, the Holy Tongue, to Aramaic, the language of the people.

This is especially true of the Mourner’s Kaddish. “Exalted and hallowed be His great name, throughout the world which He has created according to His will.” This is so powerful. Here you have a person who has just suffered a loss, yet praising G-d and accepting that the world runs not according to our plans, but according to His.

The depth and pathos of such a raw moment, no angel can appreciate, no disembodied intelligence can fathom. It’s too real for AI. Some things are between us and G-d, and no body else.