Jan Burzlaff

Post Doctoral Associate in the Program of Jewish Studies

Jan Burzlaff, a postdoctoral associate in the Jewish Studies Program at Cornell University, teaches a course on Holocaust testimonies that uses AI as an object of study, examining how it interprets, and often reduces, the human experience in survivor narratives.

Burzlaff says:

“The Catholic Church has spent two millennia learning that the gravest threats to human dignity rarely look like threats. They arrive as progress, as convenience, as common sense.

“Pope Leo XIV is right to call artificial intelligence a moral test on the scale of the industrial revolution, and right to reach back to Rerum Novarum, the 1891 letter that confronted an earlier technology promising abundance while quietly changing what a human life was worth. But ‘protecting the human person’ only means something if we can say plainly what we are protecting it from.

“Ask today's AI to analyze a personal story from the past and it will hand back a smooth, confident summary that often invents details: a lowered shoulder, a faltering voice, a pause that was never there. LLMs cannot sit with a witness the way a person can, so it fills the silences and smooths the rough edges, and a human being turned into a tidy paraphrase has, in a small way, been erased.

“That is what is at stake with this encyclical: not whether AI is powerful, but whether we will still hold on to the particular, unrepeatable details of a single life — against a technology built to summarize them away.”

Burzlaff is available for interviews in English, German, or French.