When we look at what’s happening in Israel and around the world, or try to develop better explanatory frameworks, we often profit by stepping back to consider how historical perspectives evolved—and how biases (ours and others) skew the conversation.

Now, there’s a new player on the world stage of understanding: artificial intelligence and frontier large language models (LLMs). Some may scoff at such an idea. Aren’t these LLMs simply parroting their training data, and then reorganizing it through statistical processing? That’s called “mathing,” not thinking. From a reductionist view, perhaps. However, given their fluency and cogent outputs, they may offer worthwhile perspectives. In such cases, we would recognize these “insights” (outputs) generally as sophisticated mirrors of the user’s own inquiry rather than independent discoveries.

In time, with the improvement of AI technology, we may well land on novel and creative responses. What I would like to propose here is the use of AI less on breaking news and insider information, and more on recurring themes, especially Jewish themes, that surface in curious ways and likely influence our interpretations. Treat this approach as tentative. Your comments are welcome to my suggestion that AI is an intellectual tool, with limitations and risks, that can and should be used in critiquing what we know─our interlocutor, our hevruta or Socratic partner.

In subsequent articles, I will use AI to red-team (an adversarial prompt) articles with contemporary views of Israel. But in this essay, I plan to set the stage for understanding both the value and risks of using AI as a partner in analysis. This stage setting includes how an LLM “thinks” which requires that we turn the analytical lens on AI itself.

Let’s begin. My exploration of AI “thinking” (epistemology) led me to ask Claude’s Sonnet model to consider Franz Kafka’s “A Report to the Academy.” Kafka featured a humanized ape giving a report to a learned group, speaking in fluent German. Many commentators saw the ape, Red Peter, as........

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