I was drawn to the video, too.
Seeing celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld and Mike Bloomberg channel my rage and give a middle finger to Kanye West after his most recent antisemitic spree, which included selling a swastika shirt the video riffed on, gave me hope and made me feel less alone at a scary time.
I was also heartened to see some Jewish celebrities who have not previously spoken out against antisemitism doing so for the first time.
But it wasn’t real. The video was made by an Israeli high-tech entrepreneur using AI — which means that it revealed far more about its viewers than anyone who appeared in it.
And what it revealed is that our willingness as Jews to suspend disbelief offers evidence of our enduring hope — and a stark warning sign about a new danger that we face today.
Ever since Oct. 7, 2023, and even before, the Jews have understood what the prophet Balaam said in the book of Numbers: “This is a people that dwells alone.” Jews have felt a deep sense of isolation and despair. Their hearts have been broken, and so they wear those hearts on their sleeves.
No wonder Jews are loving and sharing the video. We want to believe that we stand up for ourselves. We want to believe that famous people care about us.
But, in fact, many in the entertainment industry have been silent since Oct. 7. The video, therefore, is not real, but it is a prayer: If only these famous people would use their massive social capital, and speak out.
We are free to love it and share it, waving aside the fact that it is a fiction, but we do so at our own peril. The video is dangerous. It could easily play into the hands of antisemites, who will accuse Jews of falsifying public proclamations of support.
An AI-generated version of Adam Sandler appears in a celebrity-studded AI video rejecting Kanye West’s antisemitism. (Screenshot)
Moreover, if AI could create a video that supports the Jews, it could just as easily create videos that defame the Jews, that offer fake video evidence of Israeli actions in the West Bank, as well as Jewish perfidy in other places. We would find ourselves embroiled in AI-induced blood libels.
Consider what havoc this could wreak with Holocaust memory; I shudder to think of how antisemites and Holocaust-deniers could manipulate the image of Anne Frank. Or, how they could manipulate images and videos of rabbis. This is the ethical category of genevat daat, deception — literally, “stealing the mind.” The collective mind won’t know what hit it.
And this is the deeper challenge: AI is making it increasingly impossible to know what is real. Chat GPT is making it increasingly impossible to know who (or what) wrote anything.
This is a universal challenge, and it is an existential issue of the first order.
So, yes, of course. “Enough is enough” — of the war against the Jews.
But, also, “enough is enough” — of the war against truth. AI is a principal weapon in that war, and we will all be its casualties. When reality itself becomes infinitely malleable; when we can no longer trust our senses; when anyone can invent any narrative of the past, present and presumably future, and produce computer-generated “evidence” of that false narrative – we will have lost civilization itself.
At that point, antisemitism will be among the least of our problems.
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