Lior Cole Is the Model Combining Artificial Intelligence With Religion

Last Fashion Week in Milan, Lior Cole headed to the National Museum of Science and Technology of Milan on her one day off from walking runways. A science buff studying information science at Cornell, she uses her downtime to explore artificial intelligence and how it merges with spirituality and religion. “It works very well with modeling. In between jobs you have downtime, and with computer stuff you can do it whenever you want,” says Cole over Zoom. “I did a photo shoot for a magazine the other day, and I brought my computer, and I was coding.”

Cole, 20, never intended to become a model and instead was busy as a sophomore at Cornell. By chance, she visited New York for the day last June with a friend and was spotted in Washington Square Park by the designer Batsheva Hay, who was in the midst of street casting and photographing her resort 2022 look book. “Lior walked by, and I thought it was too good to be true,” Hay says. “She was so tall and had long curly hair and this sweet naive smile. We took photos of her, and she could not have been more natural.” Hay then sent Cole’s photo to IMG, who shortly signed the student. Less than three months later, Cole opened the Proenza Schouler spring 2022 show on Little Island. “I was just hoping to get a show,” says Cole. “I didn’t know what to expect.” In the same season, Cole also walked for Marni, Hugo Boss, Ludovic de Saint Sernin, and Loewe.

When she’s not modeling, she’s developing Robo Rabbi, an artificial-intelligence project that taps into the teachings of the Torah. Think spiritual guidance via a computer. “People look at computers as if they are calculators and are binary, but I like computers so much because there is this algorithm of giving advice and showing how A.I. has humanlike abilities,” she says. “They have a perspective now, and people don’t see computing in that light.” Cole began thinking about the project during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year and a time of new beginnings. Robo Rabbi starts with a person’s birth parsha—a Torah portion with a lesson that corresponds to a person’s birthday. From that, Cole developed a system that will give a challenge derived from the parsha that is intended to help the person strive to become their best selves. If a person’s parsha focuses on giving back, Cole’s A.I. program will give the person a 10-day challenge that encourages a person to be charitable.

Cole explains that the Robo Rabbi taps into the boundlessness of A.I. Thanks to the GPT-3 A.I. technology—a natural-language processor—the parsha lessons and challenges come from the A.I. technology itself, allowing Cole to view herself as simply “the messenger.” “Rarely does A.I. touch spirituality and religion,” says Cole. “I am doing other projects that touch into the sentient dimensions, but there has yet to be a computer that is entirely human, that is sentient, or has human abilities.” According to Cole, a computer having its own point of view isn’t unheard of. “There are computers that can mimic humanlike capabilities,” Cole says. “The technology has a perspective and is articulating that perspective of knowledge on the internet, so it isn’t unique.” Those opinions can be channeled into a medium like Robo Rabbi, which is meant as an enlightening teaching mechanism.

Cole’s other projects include a children’s book about computer science. “I was looking at a children’s book for computer science, and it is math and coding centric. I am such a computer nerd, but I don’t like coding,” she says. “Kids should be exposed to the more human side [of computers].” She is also creating a coffee-table book to train an A.I. algorithm to program its own art and is involved in a fashion collective at Cornell, where she is developing a digital model that will be available on the NFT marketplace. Her other A.I.-minded project? Well, that she signed an NDA for.

As for modeling, Cole wants to pursue it as long as possible and considers it another curious path for her to explore. “When I was younger, I wasn’t like, Oh, I want to be a computer scientist when I’m older. I figured that out when I was in college,” she says. “And now that I got scouted, I’m like, This is cool too!’”