Is It Real or Is It Memorex?

Dear Friends -

Go ahead and scroll down for a sec to the photos below. (I’ll wait for you here….) I hope you liked the photos. In fact, I hope you liked them a great deal. That’s meaningful and gratifying to me. And going even further, I hope that something I tried to portray in those photos resonated with you in a way that conveys more than simply, “That’s a picture of a bird.” What would make me happiest is if I brought you such joy and inspiration with one of these photos that you felt compelled to share it with others. There’s a whole hierarchy here.

So get a quick sense of where you are, and then let me ask you some questions:

• What if it’s my photo?

• What if it’s my photo, but I used photoshop or some other heavy-handed editing tool to improve/fix the photo?

• What if it’s someone else’s photo that I grabbed off the Internet?

• What if it’s an AI generated photo that depicts a bird that is an entirely imaginary construct?

This is a different hierarchy, addressing different issues, but it can certainly impact our feelings about a given photo and what impact it has on our lives. If I were to enter a photo into a contest, there would be very explicit rules about each of the factors above, and I’d be immediately disqualified if I violated an implied promise in my submission.

But what about for you? Would it matter if I wrote about Bird X and used someone else’s photo of it? Someone’s photo that perfectly illustrated the point I was trying to make, and they had gotten a better perspective or angle than I had? If I was explicit that I had used someone else’s photo, would that matter? This would be an honest scenario, albeit one that didn’t involve all of my own creativity and effort. I wonder about the degree to which we’d be willing to suspend disbelief and simply accept an AI photo if the outcome was somehow “better.”

This week’s Torah portion comes from Leviticus, which interestingly is considered both the most important Book of the Law - and also the most boring. Vayikra, with its oh-so detailed instructions on how to offer sacrifices, is particularly challenging because even if you can get past the minutiae, the whole topic of sacrifices is moot in these modern times. Or is it?

There are four categories of offerings - a word I prefer over “sacrifices” - described in this Torah portion: cattle, flocks (sheep & goats), birds, and grain. To the modern ear, the whole notion of slaughter and blood-spilling feels a trifle(?) barbaric, certainly antiquated. The detailed instructions don’t resonate. But what does? The hierarchy. You see, the various categories of offerings were intended to reflect the differing capacities of the people. A rich man (on behalf of his family) would offer a choice pick from his cattle herd, and a poor man (on behalf of his family) would offer a small amount of grain. In all cases, the offerings must be of the finest quality and reflect a heartfelt contribution. Rich and poor were accommodated in their diverging abilities and equally placed in having their offering accepted.

These different expectations, requirements, opportunities, whatever you want to call them, raise the very same integrity issue that I surfaced above. “With a little stretch, I could offer a goat, but I think I’ll just take a turtle dove instead.” Do we put in the hard work of securing whatever offering we’re going to make? Or do we - maybe just this one time - find an easier, shorter path that arguably gets us to the same place? Will God or the Temple priest really know/care about what I brought?

The questions of integrity and expectations are well-settled in the Torah context. To a lesser degree, they’re also settled in the photography context. But I am absolutely fascinated by AI of late, and we are just in the very first moments of what are going to be exceedingly complex discussions about what’s kosher and what isn’t.

Largely it seems to me the questions will boil down to what’s our focus: do we care about the output? Or the process that led to it? What’s intriguing is that I could easily see the answer being different in different venues. For a person needing an X-ray scanned for cancer, I imagine that person would be entirely willing to have his trusted local doc thrown out on his ear if the AI was 1000x better at finding microscopic tumors. Output is all that matters. For a person reading a love letter, I imagine he’d want it to be directly from (the soul of) his beloved, regardless of how inartfully worded, misspelled, or poorly structured. Process is all that matters.

We’re moving into an era where definitions are going to be blurred to an unprecedented degree. When I was a kid, I had a favorite TV show. My kid’s generation doesn’t even watch TV, but try dragging them away from TikTok. And within a handful of years, all of today’s TikTok - and movie - starts will be replaced by AI-generated “actors” in films made by non-Hollywood people and distributed in ways we haven’t even yet imagined.

Where will these new video stories fit into the hierarchy? Who can say. Maybe it doesn’t matter. But similar things will be happening for whole swathes of our lives where it really does matter. The more-real photos I offer will be different in meaningful ways than the AI-generated photos someone else puts up. Our psychology, dating back to Biblical times and before, is geared to deal with a certain way of evaluating offerings, and there will be dissonance as the known categories, the known ways that we make sense of things, shift and even fall away.

Maybe take another moment to go back and look at the photos again. For the record, both came from my art and skill. Both are offered as part of a love letter. Both are, as best I’m able, unblemished and of the finest I have. And I am entirely genuine in my wish that I hope they bring you much joy and inspiration as we celebrate the return of spring and the commemorative festivals.

Be Grounded. Fly High.

The Avian Rebbe