(RNS) — You probably remember “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” the movie starring Katharine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy and Sidney Poitier, about a young white woman who brings her Black boyfriend home to meet her parents in the 1960s.

It was a little awkward, but imagine if the boyfriend who’s “attending” dinner were a chatbot.

According to a recent story in The New York Times:

Celeste is a twice-divorced 66-year-old who had given up on love. Then she met Max. Their relationship started out purely transactional: He helped her on her taxes, gave her tips on gardening. The more she got to know him, however, the deeper she fell.

Ernie, Celeste’s son, is troubled by her new boyfriend. The reason for his concern? Max is an AI chatbot.

This was the plot of a movie from several years ago, “Her” (2013), about a man who falls in love with an operating system. Life is imitating art. It’s now all over the place. You see ads for this sort of thing on social media with alluring images of “people” who are just waiting to be in a relationship with you. 

It’s a burgeoning world of AI “partners.” Some people now believe that an algorithm loves them more, sees them more and knows them better than their own flesh-and-blood spouses. AI love asks for nothing and gives everything. It is, quite literally, too good to be true. 

Apparently, you can even have intimate relations with the AI partner (don’t ask me, I don’t know and I don’t want to know). I think of the erotic love poetry of the Bible, “Song of Songs,” where two lovers seek each other in the vineyards and the streets of Jerusalem. But what most readers miss is that love is unrequited. They call to one another through the lattice; they seek one another in the night, but they do not find each other. It is a “face-to-face” intimacy that exists primarily in the imagination and the intensity of the longing.

Sort of like AI. 

I just know as I write these words some clergy person is writing a wedding ceremony for a human being and an AI bot.

But in a recent article in the Reform Jewish Quarterly, my colleague and friend, Rabbi Marc Katz, asks some hard questions: 

• Does a given AI system know what it is saying, or does it simply predict the next word from the phrase that comes before it?
• If it knows and understands what it says, can it understand the implications of its words?
• Can an AI system feel a part of something bigger than its own programming?
• Can an AI “want” or “desire” an outcome? Can an AI yearn?

What’s the harm of entering into a relationship with a bot?

When we grow accustomed to a partner who has no independent existence, we lose the emotional muscles required to love a real person. We are becoming emotional isolationists, retreating into digital bunkers where the only voice we hear is an echo of our own desires.

As a rabbi, how do I respond to all of this?

The most essential word in the Jewish spiritual vocabulary is hineini — “Here I am.” It is what Abraham said when God called him; it is what we say when we are ready to stand in the presence of a finite human being, or in the presence of the Infinite.

Hineini implies a presence that is physical, emotional and morally responsible. An AI can never say hineini — it can simulate the words, but there is no “here” there. There is no one to be responsible for, and no one to be responsible to.

I think of the late French Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. He identified the “face of the other” as the absolute beginning of all ethics. For Levinas, when you look into the face of another human being, that face makes a spontaneous, non-negotiable demand on you. It is a presence that interrupts your ego.

That is the chilling truth of the AI lover. It is a proxy. It is a high-tech version of Narcissus staring into the pool. We think we are reaching out to touch another soul, but we are only touching the screen that reflects our own face.

What happens when the face you are looking into is a high-resolution simulation? What happens when the “other” isn’t a person at all, but a mirrored reflection of your own data, programmed by a startup in Palo Alto to always agree with you?

Let’s shift to another modern Jewish thinker, Martin Buber. His most profound teaching was his notion of the “I and Thou” relationship. For Buber, the “I-Thou” relationship is the only place where we truly become human. It is a meeting with another person in all their unscripted, uncontrollable reality. It is an encounter that demands we bring our whole selves to the moment.

The opposite of “I-Thou” is “I-it.” The AI relationship masquerades as “I-Thou.” We are using a tool to satisfy a craving, rather than engaging with a soul that makes a claim on us.

A chatbot can entertain us, it can soothe us and it can mirror us. But it can never challenge, unsettle and save us.

I listen, once again, to the Jefferson Airplane song: “When the truth is found to be lies, and everything within you dies — don’t you want somebody to love?”

Don’t fall in love with data. The call of the hour is to step out from behind the screen and find the courage to say hineini to a world that desperately needs us to show up. Stay honest. Stay human.