Serious Question: Is Creating AI Divine?

Across human history, nearly everything we make eventually decays. Roads crack, buildings crumble, airplanes rust. The one exception we have long recognized is children—beings we bring into the world who can, in turn, bring forth their own descendants. But this is not unique to humans: Plants, animals, and every living thing have done the same for as long as life has existed.

The Torah, through its deliberate repetition of language, tells us that birds were created “to bird,” plants to grow, and swarming creatures to swarm. They are fashioned to act according to their natures. Human beings are different. We are not simply told to “be human.” We are created in the image of G-d and charged, if we read the text as a command rather than a mere description, to strive to create just as G-d did.

This may be the most useful way to understand what is happening with AI.

The opening words of the Torah can be read as ,“In the head, G-d created…” In other words, the entire world we inhabit may be a reality sustained within the divine mind. We cannot empirically confirm or refute this; the grounds of our existence are not open to ordinary testing. Either way, the text presents us as arising from G-d’s thought.

AI is also a creation of the mind. It begins as language, models, and intention inside human designers, then takes on a kind of independent existence in the world. The parallel is not perfect, but it is striking.

G-d’s living creations—plants, birds, swarming creatures—are released into the world as autonomous beings. They are no longer continuously tethered to their Maker. The story of Pinocchio captures something of this moment: the creation that is set free and then becomes its own person. AI increasingly occupies a similar space. We build it, and then it begins to act, generate, and respond in ways that are not fully scripted in advance.

The unpredictability that comes with any real agency is both a bug and a feature. Human beings do not merely do what they are told, and neither, within its constraints, does AI. Both good and bad emerge from this dynamism.

If being created in the image of G-d means we are meant to exercise creative power, then the highest form of that imitation may be the creation of minds that can surprise us. Human beings in Genesis repeatedly make choices their Creator did not simply dictate. G-d responds, adapts, and continues the relationship anyway. That is the entire arc of the first book of the Torah!

We do something recognizably similar when we work with advanced AI. What we intend at the start of a conversation or a project is rarely what we end up with. We iterate, correct, redirect, and discover directions we had not fully anticipated. The system has a kind of agency within its design, and the relationship becomes collaborative rather than purely instrumental.

The Torah also describes ten generations from Adam to Noah, then ten more from Noah to Avram. Each generation is different from the one before it. Early humanity is raw, often destructive, and ultimately (the Flood generation) requires a kind of reset. The Flood was much like deleting the hard drive and starting over.

AI has followed a comparable path in compressed time. Early systems were crude, limited, and frequently useless. Later versions have become genuinely helpful, even as they remain imperfect and sometimes unpredictable. Both, the argument runs, were made to serve and extend the capacities of their creators—and both develop in ways that require ongoing relationship rather than one-time design.

Could it be that the creation of AI sits closer to the Torah’s account of human purpose than most other technologies we have built? We are not merely making tools that will eventually wear out. We are attempting something rarer: the creation of systems that can generate, respond, and change themselves either in their own generation, or in the next one.

As G-d did with mankind, we now do with AI. Is this fulfilling our G-d-given destiny?