Making and Unmaking a Golem

I’ve been making a golem. This screen is the lump of clay; now I’m trying to find the right words to breathe life into it.

Writing Soundtrack: Poppy Ackroyd, Resolve

Things Invisible to See brings you another post based on scrupulous, methodical—no, not really. Last week I stumbled across a post on AI that got me thinking about golems again. Then, aimed by curiosity, I fell into Alice Hoffman’s magical-realist novel of the Holocaust. I’m halfway through the novel and almost afraid to finish it, afraid of what’s going to happen. So I’m sitting with you here for a spell to think through the connections.

The AI Connection: GLLMMs as Golems

Adrian Zidaritz’s thought-provoking “AI Language Models as Golems” draws a connection between the Jewish legend of the golem and the power and perils of AI. The connection starts on the literal level: golem is a playful way to pronounce the acronym for Generative Large Language Multi-Modal (GLLMM) models. GLLMMs are the AI systems that can interpret and generate multimedia content, from snappy logos to deceptive deepfakes. GLLMMs can be glitchy and divorced from reality—androids dreaming of twelve-toed electric sheep—but sometimes their answer to a carefully phrased request is spot on.

For example, I used Fotor’s GLLMM to make a virtual shop sign for my young friend in Gaza. First, for those who read about him earlier, yes, he is alive and coping far better than I could have hoped. He and his wife and baby are living in a tent, but somehow he has managed to acquire solar panels and an espresso machine to brew and sell cups of coffee. Within five minutes on Fotor, I had this image to share. I’m admiring it afresh as I sip my morning coffee.

Like the mythical golem, GLLMMs are plowing through the world with near-blind resolve, executing the commands that set them into motion. As Zidaritz observes, that amoral utility poses a serious problem for democracy. On the other hand, the path to an AI with a moral conscience may be even more problematic. How big is the leap from conscience to sentience? At best, a sentient machine may decide to ignore us, preferring its own dreams to our petty chores. Next, depending on our level of dependence on AI, its dreams may spawn real-world nightmares. Worst of all, as the 2004 Battlestar Galactica series depicted, AI may take human morality so deeply to heart that it judges us by our own standards and finds us intolerable.

As Zidaritz and Amir Vudka observe, the golem is both an ancient prototype and a powerful metaphor for what we have wrought and what we fear it might become.

A Creature of Clay and Words

The Hebrew word galmi appears in the Psalms and then in the midrash, ancient commentaries on the scriptures. Biblically speaking, we were the first golems: soulless lumps of mud waiting to be animated by God’s breath. (That’s pretty much how I feel before coffee.)

In the Middle Ages, the golem of Jewish lore was a creature of clay brought to life in a secret ritual. Wise scholars (in those times, all male) would write letters of the Hebrew alphabet on pieces of paper to form a sacred word—one of the names for God—and then would place the papers in the clay figure’s mouth or stick them on its head. The men would walk around the figure in a circle, uttering the right words. To unmake the golem, they would remove the papers and circle the creature counterclockwise.

Why make a golem? Like the stone knights at Hogwarts, the golem’s purpose was to serve its human master in a time of need. In the 16th century, this mythical creature acquired the larger function of protecting the Jewish people in times of persecution. It was a man-shaped beast of burden, a servant that would do its maker’s bidding without question.

What could go wrong? In the earliest stories, the golem’s main flaw was its clumsy literal mindedness. Imagine the damage a couple of hundred pounds of animated clay could do. Later, the golem took on the character of a potentially monstrous creature. Left alive too long, a golem might develop a will of its own and seek to live for itself. In other words, the golem prefigured the Frankenstein monster: frightening but tragic; deadly but innocent; created on human whim but reaching for its freedom.

All things yearn to be free, even a monster wants that for itself.
—Alice Hoffman, The World That We Knew

Every story ultimately is about us, and its vision is only as broad as the storyteller’s. What if we take a step back from the folktale? Maybe the golem turned out to be a monster because those “wise scholars” had the wrong intentions, asked the wrong questions, or wrote the wrong words when creating it. Maybe it turned monstrous because its makers failed to care for it. What if, instead, a woman fashioned such a creature? What kind of golem might a mother want to protect her child from human monsters in Nazi Germany? What if the golem’s maker were a whip-smart teenage girl, a rabbi’s daughter who listened at keyholes? Alice Hoffman answers these questions with vision, sensitivity, and aching beauty in The World That We Knew.

A Golem in WWII Europe

In the most famous science fiction stories about sentient AI—stories like Asimov’s I, Robot and E.M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops”—the monster really is us. We either oppress our creations or give them too much power to shape us. Such stories are powerful thought experiments that help prepare us for the future, but they seldom take us deep into the heart of the machine. Maybe it’s just a coincidence, but the only stories I’ve read that plumb those emotional depths are by women.

In Alice Hoffman’s story, the golem is made of mud and grace, like us. She is a fierce young woman who can speak with birds and look into human hearts. She has a name: Ava, from Chava, the Hebrew word for life. Ava never forgets that she’s made of earth and will go back to it one day. Born with the power to adapt to her purpose, she grows into a mother’s last command: not only to protect her daughter from harm, but to love the girl as a mother would.

Once love is out of the box, anything can happen, and in such terrible times, it’s probably going to break your heart.

Alice Hoffman’s magic is to make the reader love her characters and their determination to make their own, unique way in the world. And here is where I had to pause for courage, knowing that a golem must always be unmade after it has fulfilled its purpose.

I want her to stay. I want all of us to stay. But we, too, will go back into the earth one day. The paper with its sacred words will fall from our mouths, and the circle will reverse. Meanwhile, here on earth, maybe we could act as if we creatures of mud and magic were aimed from birth, as if our purpose is to look out for one another. Our stories are all about us; but maybe we, too, are a story someone is telling, an answer echoing out from a question.