From Golem to GLLM

Abstract

This article explores the symbolic entanglements between Jewish mystical traditions and the contemporary rise of generative artificial intelligence. Taking the Golem - a mythical anthropoid animated through sacred language - as a guiding figure, I examine how current developments in Large Language Models (LLMs) revive long-standing theological concerns about animacy, speech, and the limits of human control. The Golem offers a hermeneutic tool for understanding LLMs as language-animated entities whose operations are mytho-technical as much as they are computational. Crucially, LLMs have crossed what Jewish mysticism held as the ultimate threshold: the capacity for speech that distinguished divine creation from human artifice. Drawing on Kabbalistic cosmology, I argue that the AI alignment problem cannot be reduced to engineering challenges but requires what I term "magical alignment" - a ritual architecture that recognises AI development as participation in cosmotechnical processes demanding ethical preparation, relational responsibility, and planetary awareness.