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ChatGPT can write verse, but it is no more alive than the Golem of Prague
(JTA) — ChatGPT, an AI (artificial intelligence) chatbot with remarkable abilities to mimic human language, has been making big news. One stunt that’s gotten a lot of attention is ChatGPT’s alleged ability to write poetry. If true, this would mark a major advance. If an AI app can write real poetry, it has acquired a soul.
Have we crossed that threshold now with ChatGPT? The program is fun and swiftly generates remarkably lifelike responses to queries and prompts, in grammatically correct if somewhat dull and stuffy sentences. Still, the responses are often full of excellent information.
We’ve certainly made progress in building machines that think. The chess program Deep Blue can beat any grandmaster. Given a prompt like, “Draw me Donald Duck in the style of Rembrandt surfing on an ocean of macaroni” an art-generating AI like DALL-E can produce remarkable illustrations instantly. “Write me a sonnet about e-bicycles in the style of Shakespeare “— presto, ChatGPT can spit out a sonnet.
For many, the difference between these AI-generated products and the real deal is hard to discern — as it was for the congregants of the New York rabbi who delivered a sermon generated by AI this past Shabbat. If ChatGPT is writing poetry it has passed a most difficult version of the Turing test.
Alan Turing, the early computer scientist who helped crack the Nazis’ Enigma code in World War II, speculated on how to tell if a machine has acquired real intelligence: Can it fool a human being into believing it, too, is human? Imagine yourself exchanging texts with an unseen source hidden behind a screen. If you can’t tell whether you are conversing with a machine or a person, the computer has passed the Turing test.
But I’ve found a loophole. What if the human judge is devolving at the same rate that AI is advancing? Perhaps people are becoming more like computer programs as computer programs become more human. I often hear people say, “I am multitasking,” or “I need to recharge my batteries.” They are emulating machines and even a little proud of it. What if ChatGPT seems to be writing poetry because so many people have become so mechanical in their thinking they can’t recognize the poetry of life?
Out of the wounded vanity of a merely human poet, I asked ChatGPT to “write me a poem about kabbalah in the style of Rodger Kamenetz.” Here are the first four lines:
Kabbalah, the ancient wisdom of the Jews
Enshrined in symbols, stories, and the Tree
Of Life, a map to guide us through our dues
And find the spark of divinity within
To those who know and love poetry this isn’t poetry. It is verse — language written in a rough iambic pentameter that has zero felicity.
The verse offers some good clichés about kabbalah because ChatGPT draws instantly from the whole internet. But ChatGPT has no idea what it is saying. It doesn’t care, or have access, to the kind of truths found in poetry. It just cobbles words and phrases together in a plausible way. Since I asked for a poem, it pours the content into a metrical form. But that doesn’t make it beautiful.
In skillful verse, line breaks and end rhymes create variety and emphasis. But what emphasis is served by rhyming “Jews” and “dues”? What does “dues” even mean in this context — unless it’s a reminder to pay your synagogue dues?
Judging from the response to ChatGPT’s verse, many do think it writes poetry. But that’s where the loophole comes in. The Turing test depends on a human judge. For a judge who has never spent time dwelling on what is beautiful in poetry, ChatGPT has passed the test. But that does not prove that ChatGPT is genuinely creative. It just proves that many people have little interest in poetry, and do not value primary imagination. If I can’t tell whether I am talking to a program or a person, maybe the problem is with me. I pity anyone who can’t distinguish verse written by a bot and a poem by Alicia Ostriker or Gerald Stern.
ChatGPT is no more alive than the legendary golem of Prague.
It is said that the Maharal — the great Rabbi Judah Loew of 16th-century Prague — fashioned a magical creature of river mud in order to (what else?) save the Jews. Using permutations of the names of God, the Maharal brought the golem to life by writing “emet” on the creature’s forehead — Hebrew for “truth.”
The legend is rooted in Talmudic discussions of the mystical Book of Formation (Sefer Yetzirah), and further back to Genesis 2:7 which describes a second version of Adam’s creation:
Then the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.
Here we see the original transition from matter to life, from a mere golem — a heap of dirt — to an “adam,” a human being. And according to the 2nd-century translator Onkelos, what marks that transition is the human’s ability to speak poetic language.
When Onkelos translates Genesis 2:7, he renders the Hebrew “nefesh haya” — living soul — as the Aramaic “ruach m’mamila” — a speaking spirit. Poetry is that spirit speaking. Poetry is the utterance of a living soul. And poetry inscribes truth, not on a forehead of mud, but on the human heart.
ChatGPT cannot tell — and doesn’t care — whether what it is writing is true or beautiful. But in the best poetry we hear that strong “speaking spirit” — what Wallace Stevens called “the voice that is great within us.” Poetry rings true — and makes us more beautifully human.
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VIDEO: A Hasid gives us a tour of Morocco in Yiddish
דער ירושלימער יוטוב־שטערן וועלוול קירשנבוים האָט לעצטנס אַרויסגעשטעלט אַ ווידעאָ אויף ייִדיש פֿון אַ פּרעכטיקן וויזיט, וואָס ער האָט געמאַכט אין מאַראָקאָ. עס באַגלייט אים זײַן חבֿר אַבֿרהם פּרץ.
אינעם ווידעאָ זעט מען ווי קירשנבוים דאַוונט שחרית מיט די אָרטיקע ייִדן און באַזוכט אַ גוט אָפּגעהיטענעם בית־עולם, וווּ עס ליגן באַערדיקט גרויסע צדיקים ווי למשל הרבֿ חיים בן עתר (1696–1743), באַקאַנט ווי דער „אור החיים“. „מענטשן מיינען, אַז נאָר אין אייראָפּע זענען דאָ קבֿרים פֿון צדיקים!“ זאָגט קירשנבוים.
מיר זעען אַ גרויסע, שיינע שיל מיט אַ פֿײַנער אַרכיטעקטור אין קאַזאַבלאַנקאַ; דעם גרויסן אַראַבישן שוק, וווּ קירשנבוים קויפֿט זיך אײַן מלבושים פּונקט ווי די מאַראָקאַנער גייען אָנגעטאָן. ער באַוווּנדערט אויך די שיינע טיי־גלעזער און טשײַניקן, וואָס מע פֿאַרקויפֿט דאָרט, און באַקענט זיך מיט אַ ייִדישן סוחר וואָס האַנדלט מיט זילבער און גאָלד, פּונקט אַזוי ווי זײַן טאַטע און זיידע האָבן געטאָן פֿאַר דור־דורות.
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Conservative and Christian movies are coming for Hollywood
A star-studded new movie set in a Soviet prison is coming out in November. James Franco and Rob Lowe anchor the cast of Confession, playing a brutal prison guard and an imprisoned dissident professor, and a disheveled Nick Nolte appears as a fellow prisoner.
These actors were once huge gets, and their names could convey legitimacy to a project. Nolte and Franco both have received Academy Award nominations. Lowe was a member of the Brat Pack, and was a regular on The West Wing.
Confession, written by Ben Shapiro and produced by the rightwing tabloid-esque news site The Daily Wire, is not the expected fare for actors with that kind of name recognition; Shapiro’s screenwriting aspirations have been the target of ridicule for years.
Nevertheless, this isn’t the only Daily Wire production getting big names; Danny Trejo signed onto a pro-ICE movie about Minneapolis in the aftermath of the Renee Good shooting, and Jonathan Majors led Run, Fight, Hide: Infidels earlier this year.
Each one of these actors has been, in some way, canceled or in career doldrums so may have been more open to working with The Daily Wire. And some have claimed that they did not know who Shapiro was, or what his politics were; Trejo’s son, Gilbert, said his 82-year-old father did not endorse ICE and was misled about the movie before he signed his contract.
Movie studios have struggled through the pandemic and the streaming era, both of which have tanked box office receipts, leaving the field open for movies from offbeat production studios. In addition to The Daily Wire, there has been a whole ream of Christian movies attempting to shift the stereotype of bible movies — that they’re preachy, low-budget straight-to-TV affairs with cardboard acting — to something more prestigious, or at least profitable.
The Christian company Angel Studios has been placing screenings of the half philo-semitic, half-antisemitic Jesus TV series The Chosen in movie theaters across the country, produced the right-wing hit The Sound of Freedom and is pumping out faith-based movies like the animated King of Kings Christmas story and David, a kiddie movie about the biblical king. Recently, Pinnacle Peak Pictures, another faith-based production company, premiered Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, another bible movie that was notable enough to merit a review in The New York Times. (Though admittedly it wasn’t a particularly positive one.)
For decades, Hollywood, and the media industry at large, has been associated with liberalism, progressive politics and diversity. (This is part of why conservative conspiracy theorists often insist that Jews control the media.) Even when conservatives are in power, satirical movies have poked fun at the ruling class — Team America: World Police spoofed George W. Bush’s foreign policy, while M*A*S*H critiqued Richard Nixon. During the current Trump administration, we’ve seen One Battle After Another lambasting immigration policies and rising white nationalism, Eddington on misinformation and populism, and The Apprentice depicting Trump directly.
But a rising number of higher-budget, bigger releases from the right wing, whether The Daily Wire’s conservative political parables or the Christian fables, are bringing a new kind of messaging — about the importance of God and country, about gender roles, about about the centrality of Jesus to the U.S. — to the American movie-going public.
This is no accident. A group of powerful conservative Christians, many of whom worked on Project 2025, are proponents of the Seven Mountains Mandate, a blueprint for Christian nationalism that instructs Christians to gain influence and control over the “seven mountains” of society — which include media, entertainment and the arts. The Mandate is part of the New Apostolic Reformation, a decentralized evangelical movement embraced by millions of Americans.
Jeremy Boreing, the director of many Daily Wire movies — though he has since left the company — said on a podcast hosted by businessman Patrick Bet-David that “It had always been part of our strategy to move into making culture, not just criticizing culture” as a way of proving that “there is a future where conservatives aren’t losing. There’s a future where we have political power and cultural power.”
Cultural power, of course, requires more than just a lot of movies; they have to be well-done, or at least appear to be. Previous Daily Wire productions, as well as other right-wing, MAGA movie ventures, have been hacky. Lady Ballers, about an unsuccessful men’s basketball team pretending to be women so they can dominate the league, was an unsubtle, unfunny and ultimately unwatchable spoof of transgender athletes. And even plenty of higher-budget attempts, like Daniel and the Fiery Furnace, can still fall victim to wooden acting and writing.
But now, with the financial success of movies like The Sound of Freedom and biblical parables like The Chosen, bigger stars are being drawn to projects like the Daily Wire’s lineup of pro-ICE, anti-immigration and anti-LGBTQ movies. With those bigger stars may come new audiences who might not have watched a Christian movie or Daily Wire project otherwise. And where there is money and viewers, mainstream Hollywood will go, too, no matter how progressive people expect the industry to be. We’ve already gotten a biblical epic from Amazon Prime, with The House of David, and there are likely to be many more to come.
After all, it wasn’t so long ago, after all, that Cecil DeMille’s The Ten Commandments was the biggest movie in town.
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‘Heil’ Mary? New Atlanta Falcons logo inspires Nazi comparisons
If there was something off about the logo the Atlanta Falcons unveiled on social media Wednesday, whoever runs their accounts did, uh, not see it.
Behind the black falcon graphic that began appearing on the football team’s helmets in the 1960s was a new background — a flag of red, tan, black and white vertical stripes. To thousands of people who responded to the logo, it looked distinctly German — in a 1930s kind of way.
“The Atlanta Falcons are preparing to invade Poland,” one fan wrote.
A day after its posting, the new profile picture had unleashed a deluge of Nazi memes in the 4,000-plus replies on X. One picture swapped in the logo for Nazi flags in the background of a historical photo of a Hitler rally. Another edited the Falcon claw to look like a Nazi salute.
Others depicted Hitler in a Falcons cap, references to Inglourious Basterds and the Battle of the Bulge and a World War II joke invoking a blown lead in Super Bowl LI.
“Falcons were up 28-3 at Dunkirk,” that tweet read.
The Falcons’ snafu enters a small but growing catalogue of Reich-coded brand mixups. Who can forget the German national soccer team’s ‘44’ soccer jerseys? There was also the swastika-emblazoned Hallmark gift wrap; the accidental Hitler mugs; and (for my money) the worst of the bunch, Zara’s concentration camp uniform shirt.
All of those have been addressed; so far, the Falcons’ has not. We’ve reached out to them for comment.
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