AI and the Golem

11 hours ago 1

Recently I, like a lot of people who make their living by creating things, have been thinking a lot about so-called AI. I have been forced to do this because so many companies have been stealing the output of people like me in order to train their large language models, despite the fact that we own the copyright to them. I find myself, along with thousands upon thousands of others, in a ridiculous situation wherein I am constantly told that as a historian soon my services will no longer be necessary because software will just do all the thinking for us, and that my skills are worthless. Ironically, were the companies who have stolen all my work to train their models to pay me for them they would, however, go bankrupt. No one is willing to attempt to explain that contradiction.

Read more: On AI and the golem

Of course, it is laughable to think that AI, such as it currently exists, will ever be able to do the work of historians. All it knows how to do is guess the next word in a series of sentences based off of a slurry of everything ever created. It can’t analyse, or make new discoveries, and it certainly can’t read, for example, fourteenth century Bohemian batarde hand in manuscripts. That has not stopped tech CEOs, none of whom apparently understand what historians do or what history is, from dreaming of a world where humans don’t do any of the work that makes us human.

All of this is incredibly depressing, and even worse, incredibly stupid. I hardly need to tell you that. It is also incredibly reminiscent, to me, of several early modern legends about people who try to get out of work by creating something approaching ‘life’.

The legend that I think about most in this context is that of the golem, because I am unable to think about anything other than Prague for prolonged periods of time. For those not in the know, a golem is, more or less, a being made out of clay, much as Adam was by God (amiright) and then animated, usually through writing in the mud on its forehead, or by putting something around its neck or in its mouth with the same writing on it. As a general rule, said golems are created in order to do the bidding of the individual who created them. The golem has a long and interesting tradition within Jewish culture and in the Middle Ages it was generally just being reported that some people had managed to create them.[1] By the seventeenth century it was reported that a certain Rabbi Eliyahu in Chlem had gone so far as to create one.[2]

The Prague golem, which is probably the best-known version of the type was alleged to have been created in the seventeenth century, during the rule of the Emperor Rudolph II (1552-1612) (shout out to a real one), but to be honest, we don’t have any real written records of this specific tradition until the nineteenth century.[3] Anyway said story goes a little something like this:

In the sixteenth century, Prague’s Jewish community were the subject of periodic violent attacks. That’s … just a fact. However it was one that the famous Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel (c. 1524 -1609) was not happy about. In order to do something about it, he went down to the banks of the Vltava, just to the West of the ghetto and collected a bunch of clay. He then moulded a large man out of the clay, and through a series of rituals, brought it to life. To do that he placed a magical word – the shem, which is the unutterable name of God – somewhere. I think I have heard of the shem on the forehead most often in this context, but I have also heard the mouth version. The golem was named Yossele and could do all sorts of cool stuff like make himself invisible. It could certainly terrorise the goyim when they were acting a fool.

Because the Rabbi was a conscientious employer, he would remove the shem from the golem’s mouth every Friday evening so homeboy could have the day off with everyone else. In most versions of the story, one Friday the Rabbi was busy with something else and forgot to take the shem from the Golem. Furious at still existing, and lacking the oversite of Rabbi Loew, the golem went on a rampage, killing several people, until the Rabbi managed to show up, and remove the shem. The golem fell into pieces and the bits of clay were then stored in the attic of the Old New Synagog. Varying legends say that it is still there today or that it was eventually removed and buried out in Žižkov.

You may be thinking ‘Very cool story Eleanor, but why do we care about this in the context of AI?’ I am glad you have asked me the question I put into your mouth, thanks.

The answer lies in interpretations of what the fuck we are meant to make of this story. According to the historian Moshe Idel, the golem as a legend serves largely to reinforce the idea of a hierarchy within Jewish culture. Those who held deep knowledge of Hebrew language had the ability to work complex magic.[4] This is a very good way of convincing kids to study hard at Yeshiva, I think we can all agree.

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It is also rather like what we are currently experiencing in the breathless coverage of AI from our entirely captive and credulous press. I am thinking particularly of the ridiculous ass letter written and signed in 2023 by a few hundred AI bullshit artists, I mean, ‘experts’ about how AI poses an ‘existential threat to existence.’[5] I will save to the clicks – they do not mean as a result of it using up the last drinkable water on Earth, or the way it encourages young people to harm themselves. They are pretending that the predictive text machine is gonna start a nuclear war or something.

This is essentially the same thing as the golem stories, because what they are attempting to do is position themselves as a sort of priestly class with access to forbidden, arcane knowledge that must be feared, respected, and obeyed. They believe themselves to be the Rabbi Loew of this story. This justifies the obscene valuations on their companies, and the ridiculous salaries they pull down for inventing Clippy 2.0. At least it does according to them, the people who are trying to sell this to you.

Unlike the Prague golem story, however, AI doesn’t actually do anything good or useful. At least our good friend Yossele was doing something for his community until he very much wasn’t. All AI knows is say there’s four Rs in strawberry, be automatically added to your phone, eat up resources, and lie.

There’s another golem story that I think is also pertinent here, however. A children’s version of the story exists, that has real ‘Sorcerer’s Apprentice’ vibes. In it, Rabbi Loew decides that a way the golem can help out around the ghetto is for him to get busy making porridge for the hungry. This was all very lovely, but one little boy was never satisfied with the one bowl of porridge that he received, and spent a long time watching the golem. On the Friday when Rabbi Loew forgot to take the shem from the golem he swung into action, and ordered the golem to make porridge. The golem obliged and got to work, but the trouble was that the kid didn’t know how to get the golem to stop making porridge. It continued to make more and more porridge which flowed first out of the pot, then down the street, and eventually under the doors of the Synagog itself. Luckily Rabbi Loew noticed the porridge flow, and led his congregation into the high ground of the cemetery where they managed to survive. Eventually everyone had to eat their way through the porridge for several weeks after, and no one found the golem again.[6]

This, to me, is also rather like our current predicament. In theory, AI was created to do a bunch of stuff for people that we didn’t want to do. In theory it’s meant to be doing our meeting minutes or doing book indexes, or making spreadsheets for us. In reality it can’t do any of those things. What it can do is make a bunch of totally sub-par pseudo ‘art’ where uncanny valley looking underage girls with huge boobs are your girlfriend. The internet is awash with this garbage, all of which was built on the work of actual artists who have not been remunerated for it. We are drowning in a sea of pablum, because some people are children and unable to realise that limits are important.

Further, the porridge story overlaps with the more common golem story in that it highlights the necessity of human oversite in order to make an automaton useful. There’s no way for a creation such as this to understand context. You tell it to make porridge – it makes porridge. If you don’t watch it 24/7 – it might go on a rampage and start harming people. Humans still need to be involved the entire time in order for such an invention to be useful. So you may as well get humans to do the thing because you aren’t actually getting out of any work here. You are simply creating a new form of labour.

More to the point, doing the work oneself is often what makes the resultant product worth it. We appreciate beautiful paintings or drawings because of the dozens of hours that good examples require. Worthwhile writing is the result of deep intellectual work on the part of those who write it. If you are not thinking about the things you produce, then they inherently have no meaning. To believe that one can extract humans from this equation is inherently childish, and even dangerous.

Whatever the theoretical meaning of golem stories, the underlying message is the same. Just because one can do something, doesn’t mean one should. This is something that we have been pretty clear on for two hundred years. A soul is required for work to be safe and meaningful. Any attempt to convince you otherwise is hubris at best, and just a straight up scam at worst.

We are teetering on the edge of the collapse of this particular bubble, and there’s no doubt that ordinary people who didn’t waste precious resources generating sub-par horny images are going to pay the price. Unfortunately, there is very little I can do for us in that regard. What I can do is highlight the fact that the people of the past already answered the philosophical questions surrounding this particular bad idea for us. As we are constantly told that the arts and humanities have no value, and that we can have machines do that work for us, I think this is an important reminder. To be human is to do the work. For better or worse.

[1] A really good study on all the people discussing this can be found in Moshe Idel, ‘Golems and God: Mimesis and Confrontation’, in, O. Krueger, R. Sarioender, A. Deschner (eds.), Mythen der kreativitaet (Lembeck: Lembeck O, 2003), 224–268.
[2] Moshe Idel, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1990), p. 296.
[3] The earliest reference we currently have comes to us from 1837 in Berthold Auerbach, Spinoza: Ein historisher Roman, Vol. 2. (Sttugart: 1837), pp. 2-3.
[4] Idel, Golem,
[5] Kevin Roose, ‘A.I. Poses ‘Risk of Extinction,’ Industry Leaders Warn‘, The New York Times. 20 May 2023. <Accessed 25 October 2025>
[6] A delightful illustrated version of this story can be found in the gorgeous children’s book The Three Golden Keys by Peter Sis. (New York: Farrar Straus & Giroux, 2001).