The Detroit Lions of Judah: An Esoteric Use Case for ChatGPT

A few weeks ago, I inadvertently offended a few of my fellow tribesmen (admittedly a not uncommon occurrence) by mentioning that I had been able to make great use of ChatGPT in exploring some of the less straightforward elements of religious texts. I guess I should have known better– this particular social media enclave in which the discussion took place leans very Orthodox, and Orthodox Judaism is often very much about having serious discussions about technology before using it. This is a good thing, in general, but it can be exhausting for an outsider who is constantly feeling judged. I often feel like I have to tiptoe around conversations for fear of mortally offending someone, and this is challenging for someone who is both very curious and enjoys poking things to see how they work.

“Well, it just makes stuff up!” someone blurts out, as though a machine can never be trusted to do the job of a human.

Ok, so, not exactly. Yes, you have to fact-check many things that come out of ChatGPT! But you should fact-check most things in general! You should also always rely on multiple sources! 

For example, I have a Stone Chumash (Torah, a.k.a. Jew-Bible, in book form), that has a lot of annotations. It’ll be like, “Rashi thinks that this one word means this one thing, but other scholars think this other thing.” It can be useful to explore these Other Things in greater detail elsewhere. Similarly, I can usually trust Chabad to provide good commentary and information on Jewish texts and exegesis. But I also know that Chabad’s own body of exegesis and commentary includes a lot of weird layers and worldviews that I am frankly not always as excited about, to put it mildly.

So, Jew content or not, it’s always important to be able to balance the sources whence you derive information. If someone told me that they only got their news from The Handbuilt City, for example, I might quietly ask some colleagues for suggestions of therapists.

It’s Making It Up. Sometimes, That’s The Point!

Sometimes, though? It’s OK to have Chat just completely invent content, as long as you understand that it’s doing just that– inventing content based on whatever parameters you put in. It’s also valuable to understand Chat’s limitations. Chat is not exactly creative per se because robots aren’t necessarily creative. But is very good at creating connections between things using instructions. If I say, “create a theoretical framework that connects [x] and [y] things [that are normally and fundamentally unrelated],” it’ll stretch across its vast electrical web of if/then statements, matrix multiplication, tokenization, and what not, to come up with a response. It’s great at responding to things like, “come up with [x] in the style of [y].”

It is not particularly artful, though. So, it’s going to write really lousy poetry and bad jokes. But it’ll be able to break down complex theory into simple language, or give you an indication of whether some idea you have is crazy or not.

In this case, I wanted to ask ChatGPT if it could write me a Jewish prayer for the NFL in advance of the Detroit Lions vs. the Minnesota Vikings game.

Here’s what it came up with:

Yehi ratzon mil’fanecha, Adonai Eloheinu v’Elohei avoteinu

she-tishmor al ha-sportaim ve’al kol ha-mishtatfim ba-NFL

vetinahem lahem ko’ach, bri’ut ve-ruach shel kavod

kedei sheyitnahagu b’achva uvetzedeq

vetishlach shalom beinehem uvein ha-tzofim

baruch atah adonai, shomeia tefilah

Amen.

What it means

The yehi ratzon (“יהי רצון”, written in the jussive or jussive subjunctive tense, as when we say “may it be”) is a petitionary prayer (bakashot), differentiated from blessings (shevachim) and prayers of thanksgiving (hodaot). The prayer addresses God directly, saying, “may it be [your] will before you.” The translation is as follows:

May it be Your will before You,
Lord our God and God of our ancestors,
that You safeguard the athletes and all who participate in the NFL
and grant them strength, health, and a spirit of honor.
so that they conduct themselves with camaraderie and fairness.
and bring peace between them and all the spectators.
Blessed are You, Lord, Who hears prayer.

Amen.

Some interesting things to me were the Hebrew loan word “sport” (“sportaim”), and also the use of the ‘q’ in the word “uvetzedeq,” which is often transliterated as “tzedek.” As Chat explained to me when asked, Hebrew uses two separate letters here, and it told me that the academic transliteration style errs on the side of separating these two separate sounds of ‘k’ and ‘q’, though they sound similar. It gave a great explanation as to why. An excerpt of our exchange is provided below:

Conclusion

According to the Talmud, Jews should say one hundred blessings each day. This is not meant to be an imposition or a constraint, but rather a way to bring a Jew closer to God. But a hundred is a lot of blessings! So, I’m thinking that it could be useful to figure out new blessings if we’re struggling to figure out how to make up that count of 100.