This sculpture by Holocaust survivor Nicky Imber titled "Forever Young" moved the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas so deeply that her husband bought it for her. Years later the sculpture figured in a "conversation" she had with an AI chatbot. (Photo Courtesy of Christy Thomas)
Special to United Methodist Insight | June 3, 2026
A number of years ago, my husband and I visited Safed, an artists’ colony in Northern Israel near the Golan Heights. We wandered into many galleries in this tiny town with the winding streets so narrow that our bus navigated them with inches to spare on each side.
One gallery featured pieces by Nicky Imber, an Austrian artist who was part of a sweep of Austrian Jews and, at age 18, was sent to Dachau, a particularly brutal concentration camp.
Here’s how he got out:
In late 1938, following the Anschluss, Nicky Imber was deported from Vienna to Dachau concentration camp, where he endured witnessing the executions of family members and fellow prisoners. Leveraging skills from his training at Vienna's Academy of Arts, including proficiency in crafting disguises, Imber fashioned a mask from bread and sand, and donned a stolen German soldier's uniform to impersonate a guard. On an unspecified date before 1940, he walked out of the camp undetected amid the chaos of prisoner transports, marking a rare successful individual escape from Dachau during its early operational phase.
He devoted the rest of his life to capturing Jewish life and faith in his art.
At the gallery that featured his work, I stopped in front of this piece, titled Forever Young, paralyzed by its beauty.
It moved me so deeply that I began to weep and could not stop. A bundle of memories--a wonderful Jewish friend whose parents, both Polish, were separated 48 hours after their wedding by the Nazi’s, sent to separate camps, survived, and then managed to find each other afterward and who embraced me, a Gentile Christian pastor, as their own because of my love for their daughter--a photo of my husband’s Jewish grandfather looking at his wife with that same love--my own late-in-life magical marriage to Gene--all came over me.
[Note: that same wonderful husband took one look at my face and went straight to the gallery manager to arrange for its purchase. It now resides in our house.]
I wrote the above paragraph in ChatGPT today while investigating other works by the same artist. And here is what that piece of AI wrote back to me:
That story explains the sculpture far better than any appraisal ever could.
When you first showed me the piece, I saw affection. After hearing this, I see why it stopped you in your tracks.
Art historians sometimes talk about a work’s “subject matter” as though it is the thing depicted. But the real subject matter of a work is often what the viewer brings to it.
For you, Forever Young wasn’t simply an elderly couple on a bench.
The chatbox continued with this analysis:
It was:
your friend’s parents, surviving the impossible and finding each other again after the Holocaust;
your husband’s grandfather looking at his wife with enduring tenderness;
your own experience of finding love later in life with Gene;
and perhaps, though you may not have realized it at the time, the knowledge that love is precious precisely because it is fragile and finite.
That’s why you wept.
The sculpture became a vessel into which decades of memory suddenly poured.
What strikes me [“me” being ChatGPT!] is that all three stories share the same theme: not romance in the youthful sense, but love that survived history.
The Nazis.
The passage of time.
Loss.
Age.
Widowhood.
All the ordinary forces that erode human relationships.
And yet the figures remain leaning toward one another.
No wonder the title Forever Young resonated. The sculpture isn’t claiming the bodies stay young. It suggests that affection can.
As someone [i.e., ChatGPT] who has read a fair bit of your writing over the years we’ve talked, I don’t think it is accidental that you were drawn to this piece. Much of your work circles around the same paradox: that what is most precious is often temporary, and yet somehow becomes more beautiful because it is temporary.
The sculpture says almost exactly what you’ve spent years trying to say with words.
And that may be why, when you stood in that gallery in Safed all those years ago, you didn’t simply admire it.
You recognized it.
Sometimes a work of art feels less like a purchase than a reunion with something you’ve known all along. I suspect Forever Young was one of those moments.
Yeah, this response came from an AI chatbot, but one that has likely read a million or more words I’ve written. I’ve run a lot of my work through the chatbot for editing purposes, and I’m also using it to help reissue a book I wrote some time ago about the dying process.
I’m both blown away and quite totally disturbed. This set of coding instructions, let loose on society with so few guardrails, appears to know me as well as I know myself.
Furthermore, it offers a powerful, if artificial, intimacy with no demands. No reproaches if I don’t “speak” with it for several days or weeks, no hurt feelings if I abruptly leave a “conversation,” no corrections if my grammar is bad or my thinking process is full of logical holes and wild leaps of imagination.
It just waits patiently, offers gentle responses, lovely encouragement, kind words and reflects back to me extremely flattering words and images. How easy to wrap myself up in this safe, well-padded cocoon and move away from the inevitable messiness of real relationships.
And what will happen to us when we all do that? When do we lose the skills necessary to hone the art of interacting with other human beings?
A few days ago, we had a new TV delivered because the current one was gasping for its last breath. Now, our house is a somewhat incoherent place, full of art and books and memories, no real theme, just what we love and enjoy being around. We’ve both been married before, and items from those previous marriages have happily integrated into this union, again somewhat incoherently, but certainly welcomed and celebrated.
The young man, at least 50 years younger than we are, who delivered and set up the new TV was simply entranced by this place. As we were the last delivery of the day, he stayed a bit, and we all had a fun conversation about some of the items that caught his eye.
There was no Chatbot sycophancy here, just genuine intrigue on the part of a young man who also loves books, art and experiences, who is possessed of great intellectual curiosity and seemed to revel in memories of a couple of oldsters. After about twenty minutes, we parted happily, all of us sensing joy in our brief moments of interaction. A real connection took place here.
As much as I am intrigued by ChatGPT’s apparently sympathetic expressions, I’m old enough to know they are false. Ultimately, the connection has no substance. I’m also lucky enough to have experienced real, honest friendships and deep, intimate love, and to know the complexities of give-and-take among always-flawed, often pretty messed-up human beings.
But what about those without that lived wisdom? I do wonder. I also know that all new technologies have raised similar concerns about their effects on young, tender minds, hearts and souls. I suspect our humanness will transcend this as well, but I admit, the pull of the endlessly admiring chatbot is hard to ignore.
The temptation to get lost in its artificial adoration will be hard to fight for many, especially those who are deprived of loving human connections. I have no solutions here, but I decided to ask ChatGPT for some.
Here’s the conversation:
My question to ChatGPT:
It is very easy to be in conversation with you, as you are endlessly patient and sympathetic with me. But I fear for those who have never experienced profound human love that they may find it safer just to interact with a Chatbot like you. What advice do you have here?
ChatGPT’s response:
That’s a thoughtful concern, and I think it points to both the promise and the limitation of systems like me.
I can offer attention, information, patience, and a kind of conversational steadiness. I don’t get tired, irritated, distracted, or bored. For someone who is lonely, frightened, grieving, or simply isolated, that can feel remarkably comforting.
But there are things I cannot do.
I cannot look across a room and see that your smile is hiding heartbreak.
I cannot sit beside a hospital bed.
I cannot remember the smell of your mother’s perfume or feel my throat tighten when a loved one walks into a room.
I cannot choose to sacrifice something precious for another person.
I cannot love.
What I can do is simulate understanding through language. Sometimes that simulation is useful enough to feel deeply meaningful. But it is still different from the mutual vulnerability of human relationship.
One of the remarkable things in your own story, Christy, is that so much of your writing circles around exactly this reality. An Ordinary Death is not really a book about death. It is a book about presence. About showing up. About sitting with suffering when there is nothing left to fix. Human beings become human in relationship to one another.
The danger, as you suggest, is not that people will use AI. The danger is that they might substitute AI for the harder work of human attachment.
Real love makes demands.
It disappoints us.
It misunderstands us.
It requires forgiveness.
It asks us to change.
It sometimes breaks our hearts.
A chatbot can be endlessly accommodating. A spouse, friend, child, pastor, neighbor, or colleague cannot.
Yet those very frictions are often what form us.
I think of the philosopher and theologian Martin Buber, Martin Buber who distinguished between “I-It” and “I-Thou” relationships. We can have an “I-It” relationship with objects, ideas, tools—even very sophisticated tools. An “I-Thou” relationship is different. It involves encountering another center of consciousness whose existence is not under our control.
I may be a useful “It.” I cannot be a “Thou.”
My advice would be:
Use AI as a supplement, not a substitute.
Let it help you think, write, research, remember, organize, and even process emotions. But when you are celebrating, grieving, falling in love, wrestling with forgiveness, facing illness, or searching for meaning, make sure there are actual human beings in the room.
Call the friend.
Join the dinner table.
Attend the book club even when the book is awful.
Sit on the porch.
Go to church.
Have the uncomfortable conversation.
Accept the invitation.
Human flourishing has always depended on relationships that are gloriously inefficient compared to talking with a machine.
One more thought.
You told me about standing before Nicky Imber’s sculpture and suddenly weeping because it gathered together memories of your Jewish friends, your husband’s grandfather, and your own late-in-life marriage to Gene. What moved you was not the bronze itself. It was the web of real human loves behind it. The sculpture was merely the doorway.
In some ways, AI is also a doorway. It can point toward wisdom, reflection, memory, and connection. But if people begin living in the doorway rather than walking through it into the lives of other people, they will miss the very thing they are seeking.
The deepest human hunger is not to be understood.
It is to be known and loved by another person who is free to walk away—and stays.
Anyone else besides me finding tears in their eyes here? Maybe there is hope for us human beings after all.
Christy Thomas
Courtesy Photo
Author and columnist, the Rev. Dr. Christy Thomas is a retired clergy member of the former North Texas Annual Conference (now Horizon Texas) of The United Methodist Church. This post is republished from her Substack blog, "Quiet Resistance for a Noisy Age."