In recent years, it has been our technology that has “recognized” us. Our smartphones and laptops are unlocked by fingerprint readers, virtual assistants, like Siri and Alexa, are activated by our voices, and facial recognition technology scans our faces in various security contexts. Recognition and identification technology became prominent, especially with the rise of modern and urban environments. As people in city settings began to work and live in close proximity with strangers—and without the deep knowledge of neighbors that might have been assumed in small-town communities—the question of identity began to shift from a notion of moral character, or societal role, to a more physically based concept. From nineteenth-century detective literature to contemporary crime scene investigation dramas, the fascination with forensic technologies, allowing for the analysis of unknown bodies, foregrounds our emphasis on physical markers to determine identity.
The emergence of generative AI, however, seems to introduce a significant reversal. Rather than our technology recognizing us, we are now being called to discern it, even as AI voice simulators, deepfakes, and large language models trouble our confidence in our biometric tools and our own perception. In 2024, a British company fell victim to scammers when an employee was tricked into paying over $25 million to a false account during a video call with an AI clone that adopted the persona of the employee’s boss.1 This fraud by AI clone is believed to have been the first of its kind.
And yet the story recalls an ancient one—that of Jacob’s theft of the paternal blessing. In the biblical account, Jacob, the smooth-skinned younger brother puts on his hairy brother Esau’s clothing, as well as goatskins on his hands and neck, and goes in to deceive his now blind and elderly father Isaac. Isaac recognizes Jacob’s voice, but because of the smell of Esau’s clothing and the feel of the goatskins, the patriarch takes Jacob to be his firstborn.
Isaac’s first words in the exchange—“Here I am. Who are you, my son?” (Gen. 27.18, English Standard Version)—capture the paradox intrinsic to the problem of recognition. Since to recognize someone is to know them again, there is a way in which the person is neither known nor unknown, but somehow both, both strange and familiar. The intimacy of “my son” (though perhaps a customary response to Jacob’s greeting of “My father”) seems at odds with the distance of “who are you?” and reflects Isaac’s perplexed state. A similar disparity is represented in the Gospels when the disciples re-encounter their newly resurrected teacher: “Now none of the disciples dared ask him, ‘Who are you?’ They knew it was the Lord” (John 21.12). For the disciples, as for Isaac, it is the liminal experience of a simultaneous, but conflicting, wondering and knowing that presents a test, as well as a possibility for a deeper understanding of the person in question.
Evoking the test of recognition, AI, by its very name, appears to conjure a dissonant identity. The unnatural falsehood of “artificial” pulls against the organic vitality of “intelligence,” while the historical usage of “artificial” to mean “prosthetic…made to replace a missing or abnormal body part”2 hints at a potential for a kind of shapeshifting or disguise. If, like with Jacob and his goatskins, a prosthetic of even a distinctive physical feature could allow for a successful impersonation, what might be the outcome of a prosthetic intellect or intelligence? This dilemma, then, is the essential moral challenge of AI—the challenge of the imposter, and of recognizing the truly human.
The challenge of the pretender is at the heart of another ancient story. In Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus returns to Ithaka as an old beggar, he is hardly taken to be the returning king who departed for the Trojan War twenty years earlier. Even after displaying his unique skill with his bow, and the scar on his thigh (which his childhood nurse recognizes), his longsuffering wife, Penelope, is slow to confirm him. She tells her impatient son:
But if he is truly Odysseus,
and he has come home, then we shall find other ways, and better,
to recognize each other, for we have signs that we know of
between the two of us only, but they are secret from others.3
Penelope understands that recognition is not a one-way process, but rather a relational and moral test that also bears on the quality and character of the recognizer—how constant her memory, how shrewd her mind, how vigilant her virtue. She seems to envision the gods almost as divine hackers, toying with the hearts and lives of humankind (and, indeed, Athene has supernaturally boosted Odysseus’ beauty in this moment), and is still cautious, even as she acknowledges Odysseus’ resemblance to her husband:
You are so strange. I am not being proud, nor indifferent,
nor puzzled beyond need, but I know very well what you looked like
when you went in the ship with the sweeping oars, from Ithaka.4 (emphases added)
The “you” of seeming recognition does not override his “strange[ness],” however, and it is only when he invokes their magnificent bed, which he built out of an olive tree, and around which he built their secret bedroom, that she yields in a tearful embrace.
A shared and secret history is also what Jesus demonstrates to the many people who come to inquire about his identity. Just as a birth mother might allow herself to be recognized by revealing her knowledge of a birthmark, or some other intimate detail about her child, Jesus’ knowledge of his questioners—Nathanael’s fig tree, and the five husbands of the woman at the well5—enables their understanding of him. John the Baptist, who, perhaps, first “recognizes” Jesus while still in the womb,6 sends messengers with a coded message: “Are you the one who is to come, or shall we look for another?” (Matt. 11.3). The unnamed, but inferred, “one” implies a speaking in confidence and a mutual knowingness, an indication of at least a partial trust, even as he still seeks an assurance. As with Penelope’s “secret signs,” Jesus alludes to the sign of miraculous events that approve him, telling the messengers: “Go and tell John what you hear and see: the blind receive their sight and the lame walk, lepers are cleansed and the deaf hear, and the dead are raised up, and the poor have good news preached to them” (Matt. 11.4-5).
Jesus calls not simply for an observation of miraculous phenomena, but a sort of recursive, meta-sensory perception—you see that the blind see, you hear that the deaf hear. This, too, is a kind of turn to the questioners, a parabolic turn by which they are invited to discover their own reflection in what they see. Like King David, who is stunned to recognize himself as the culprit in the prophet Nathan’s parable of a rich man’s exploitation of a poor man,7 the messengers, who have come to ascertain Jesus, are called to interpret themselves in the context of what they witness, as people experiencing a sort of awakening.
This self-awareness, allied to a consciousness of one’s own thoughts (as famously depicted in René Descartes’s “I think, therefore I am”), is ultimately what distinguishes the human from AI. If we understand recognition as an act of interpretation, we see how it engages metacognitive functions, such as problem-solving and decision-making, that cannot be accomplished (and certainly not meaningfully) by AI, which cannot think critically about its own processes. The recognizing mind that, when confronted by uncertainty, seeks resolution through a dynamic exchange involving a reckoning of self and others, is not only conscious of itself, but also cultivates innately human thoughts, feelings, and relationships.
Offloading much of our “recognition” work to our technology may have caused our senses, like those of Isaac, to become dulled, and our minds to be unthinking of the task. But the new existential challenge posed by AI, especially generative, provides a fresh opportunity to contemplate identity as a hermeneutic (and not only a biometric) concern, to reconsider how “who are you?” is necessarily implicated with “who am I?”, and to remember the reciprocal relational bonds—irreproducible in interactions with AI companions—which grow our character and dignify our humanity. Perhaps the difficulty and danger of (mis-)recognition is an unavoidable part of the human experience of seeing “in a mirror dimly,” but we look toward a perfect recognition—the mutual understanding and love that is truly “face to face,” when we will no longer “know in part,” but “know fully, even as [we] have been fully known” (1 Corin. 13.12).
Footnotes
- Interestingly, the employee had been persuaded when he “recognized” fellow colleagues in the video call (though these, too, were clones) who seemed to affirm the clone of the company’s CFO (Magramo, Kathleen, “British engineering giant Arup revealed as $25 million deepfake scam victim,” CNN, May 17, 2024, https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/16/tech/arup-deepfake-scam-loss-hong-kong-intl-hnk/index.html)
- Oxford English Dictionary, “Artificial,” I.1.b.
- Homer, The Odyssey of Homer, trans. Richmond Lattimore (New York: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2007), 23.107-10.
- Ibid, 23.174-6.
- See John 1.43-51, 4.6-42.
- Unlike Jacob and Esau who “struggle together” in the same womb (Gen. 25.22), John “leap[s] for joy” when their pregnant mothers meet (Lk. 1.44).
- 2 Sam. 12.1-10.
