I am an artist who puts “European Jew” in free text fields about ethnicity in surveys. I read a lot on history, stories and folklore, often with that lens.
At a recent visit to Prague, in came the Golem. Created from river mud/clay, brought to life by magic using letters in the right combination, created for help and protection in times of need, then creating damage by following instructions to the dot, without human common sense and ethical judgment. For safety reasons, it needed to be un-made, its remains allegedly on the attic of the Altneuschul in Prague. This is one version of the legend, there are more, and other stories and poems about the limits of human creation and the dangers where it goes wrong exist elsewhere too, and they still excite the imagination, not just mine.
I’m an artist who also has a day job in a completely different field. In came generative AI, where I look at things like its impact on work and learning, but my lens is a whole lot broader. At some point, sitting at the same desk for both, that very desk that also serves as my studio, these two concepts merged and demanded to be looked at together.
One always wishes to be the first with a genius idea. Of course I wasn’t. None less then Gershom Sholem, famed scholar of Jewish mysticism, saw it first. As Israel got its first supercomputer, he gave the inauguration speech that referenced the Golem. “Develop peacefully”, Gershom Sholem said. The year was 1966. I still have the same hope – and I’m sceptical.
It’s spring 2023 as I’m writing this, doing an art commission for Colossive Press for one of their cartographies. Mine features The New Golem (process notes here). Towering over the skyline of London, the Shard, Tower Bridge, with a little visual nod to the Altneuschul in Prague tucked in. With the sort of view one has from the upper echelons of an office building where (mostly) men create big things onto everyone else. Brought to life at the banks of the Thames, with zeros and ones, instead of the mystical powers of the original 22 letters in the legend, 2023’s efficiency gains.
In one version of the story, the Golem is brought to life when its creator writes EMET on its forehead, Hebrew for “truth”. To then un-make the Golem, one has to erase the first letter “E”, for MET to remain, which means “death”. Truth vs. Death, the hand is at the ready, hovering but inactive.
The original Golem is mute, as in the legend only humans possess the gift of speech. ChatGPT and friends are all speech, no body. Nobody. Not conscious. Programmed to remind you in cutesy quasi-anthropomorphic ways that they are in fact a large language model, before they astonish and confound you with the astuteness of their responses (some confabulated, truth is still an question to be resolved. There are some safeguards in place with regards to death).
In the Golem legend, its creator was a Tsadik, a righteous man, embedded in his community, a leader protecting that community from harm, with decades of learning and experience in solving ethical problems. His creation outgrew him in ways he didn’t anticipate, in the seemingly simple that turned out not to be that simple after all when common sense and judgment calls aren’t there.
His Golem was created at the scale of One. Generative AI is, as I’m writing this in June 2023, the fastest-growing application ever. Everyone is a creator on top of that layer in ways that are already impossible to keep up with. The discourse seems to belong to who shouts the loudest and who has something to sell around it on LinkedIn. The rest is largely handwringing, trying to play for time with something that’s exponential in nature and that, in the way machine learning does, keeps creating itself.
The Golem is a legend. When they opened the attic of the Altneuschul in Prague it was empty. ChatGPT and other forms of generative AI are “real”, and increasingly embedded, and will change what humans do vs. what technology does in ways we won’t fully anticipate, and a lot of the people this will affect aren’t part of the conversations yet.
Let’s make that a conversation broad, deep and inclusive enough for the size of the challenge and let that inform our way forward and our decision-making.
I’ll quote Gershon Sholem again as he concluded his speech in 1966: “develop peacefully and don’t destroy the world. Shalom”
Get the Colossive Cartography here for 2 GBP and why not buy a whole series or two…
Recommended further reading:
ChatGPT https://openai.com/blog/chatgpt
The Golem
- Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golem
- MyJewishLearning https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/golem/
- YIVO https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Golem_Legend
Gershom Sholem’s speech https://www.commentary.org/articles/gershom-scholem/the-golem-of-prague-the-golem-of-rehovoth/
The Golem Redux. From Prague to Post-Holocaust Fiction by Elizabeth R. Baer (Golem in popular culture across the ages)
Moshe Idel: Der Golem. Juedische magische und mystische Traditionen des kuenstlichen Anthropoiden. There is also an English version, both make for a very dense read)
Elie Wiesel’s version of the Golem legend, beautifully illustrated by Mark Podwal
The Golem graphic novel with beautiful paper cuts by David Wisniewski
Art by Lior Locher 