Does Artificial Intelligence Expose the Weakness of Martin Buber’s Theory?

In his most famous work, the German Jewish theologian Martin Buber distinguished between “I–Thou” encounters and “I–It” encounters. In Allan Nadler’s words, the first kind is “genuine,” involving “reciprocity, presence, relation,” while the second involves “utility, analysis, instrumental engagement,” and sometimes treating another human more like an object than a person. Nadler, after typing many queries about Maimonides into ChatGPT, wonders if Buber’s distinction breaks down in the world of large language models.