What We Are Not

AI's Role in Revealing Our Humanity

Photo by Alabaster Co on Unsplash

In Genesis 2:19-20, God introduces Adam to all the animals in the Garden of Eden “to see what he would call them.”¹ Adam names each creature, from the birds to the cattle, but Adam does not find a “fitting helper.”² Adam realizes, through the process of identifying and naming the animals around him, that he is not an animal—he is something fundamentally different—and that he craves community with creatures like himself.

It is then that God creates Eve. At first, Adam dubs this new creation “Woman” (in Hebrew, isha) for “from Man [ish] she was taken.”³ All that Adam knows of this new thing is that she is derived from him, and appears similar enough.

In Genesis 3:20, however, Adam names his wife again. After eating from the Tree of Knowledge and receiving God’s consequences, Adam names his wife Eve (Chava), “for she was the mother of all the living [chai].”⁴ This renaming is made more perplexing by the fact that Eve, as yet, is the mother of absolutely no one.

Eve’s name only makes sense when she gets her own turn at naming. In Genesis 4:1, after the expulsion from the Garden, Eve conceives and bears a child: Cain, so named because “I have gained (kaniti) a man with the help of the Lord.” In naming Cain, Eve realizes her own potential as Eve: truly, she is the mother of all living, capable of creating life in partnership with God Himself. Where Adam’s naming helped him to define himself in the negative—he is not a flamingo, or a meerkat, or a ring-tailed lemur—Eve’s process of naming defines her own nature in the positive: she is, indeed, a partner in creation.

These snippets from the Creation story have uncanny resonance with the creation narrative we find ourselves in today. The nascence of ChatGPT, a thing which seems both like and unlike the human, is an opportunity to think about both what “human” is and is not. By naming artificial intelligence—by understanding its nature—we can gain a better sense of who we are, as creatures and partners in creation.

Our first attempts at distinguishing ChatGPT from ourselves have mostly been through capability: what at first could not write an excellent essay now lacks the human talent for failures and mistakes. Thus the attempts to program CAPTCHAs to sift out users who seem to accomplish tasks too well; the obsession with imperfection and failure as the last fully human jurisdiction; the belief that we can still somehow distinguish ourselves, if only by our weakness and fallibility. These are distinctions of degree: AI is good at things, and humans are worse. They reflect a philosophy which sees no dimension of human existence beyond mechanical inputs and outputs, which seeks to understand human behavior through psychological pathologies and economic incentives. Such a philosophy will understandably see no qualitative difference between a human being and a robot.

In truth, there is some support in Genesis for such a claim. After all, one of the first namings is when God creates humanity, seeking to create something in His own image. Our existence is therefore a mirroring and explication of God’s own, and it is through encountering human beings that we can begin to appreciate the image of the Divine.

So it might be the case that in reconstructing ourselves from the ground up, we have been confronted with the hard truth of our existence: that perhaps we are indeed nothing more than deterministic machines, spitting up syntheses of things we’ve heard before, reducible to several million lines of code or trillions of synaptic connections. If ChatGPT seems mechanical and predictable, maybe it’s because we are, too. If it seems like an engine designed mostly to spout productivity in response to triggers, that could be because it is doing a good job reflecting the image of its maker.

I think, however, that our gut reaction to AI’s spread shows that we intuit, like Adam, that we are different from this creation. It is artificial (so we are natural). It is lifeless (so we have some sort of life-affirming quality). It cannot be held liable for what it says or does (so we can). The ways in which we most forcefully distance ourselves from AI are instructive for what most matters to us about being human.

A more positive approach can be found in Eve’s naming of Cain. Truly, the first two humans must have been startled to encounter a third, a phenomenon never before seen in the world; Jewish legend assumes no reproduction of any kind occurred in the Garden of Eden. Would Adam and Eve have worried about being “replaced,” that their jobs in the world would be reassigned to this little interloper? Did Adam struggle to understand what it meant to be Man anymore, now that there was another man—Eve, what it meant to be a companion, once there was more company?

These anxieties, if they did exist, are nowhere to be found in Eve’s baby-naming speech. “I have gained a man with the help of the Lord” is an expression of awe, gratitude, even supreme self-confidence. Eve, made in the image of the Creator, herself named the creator, is finally doing what she was created to do: create. She knows that she does not hold exclusive sovereignty over this new power: her new creation will go on to create, too! She cannot even dub herself Prime Mover, the first to kick off this chain of creation—that distinction goes to her own Maker. Yet Eve can exult, even boast, as she has gained a man with the help of the Lord.

Eve is not depressed by her own irrelevance—after all, she’s in holy partnership with God Himself. Nor is she drunk on her own power—there is still a Being above her, without which she’d be nowhere. Her attitude shows us that creativity is not a rival good: ChatGPT’s ability to create does not diminish our own. Furthermore, Eve’s self-definition is strengthened by her unique station as a creator, but it is not defined by it. Being able to create ChatGPT is certainly a feather in humanity’s bonnet, but we are so much more than what we can or cannot do.

BERURIAH

A version of this article originally appeared in City of God, the March 2025 print issue of the Salient.

1. Genesis 2:19

2. Genesis 2:20

3. Genesis 2:23

4. Genesis 3:20