Dead People Can’t be Resurrected by Artificial Intelligence

Hearing Elvis still lives, Paul McCartney is dead,

and the Jews were the ones who blew up the Twin Towers,

I think that the world has a hole in its head

and needs to be buried—-but please don’t send flowers.

Write eulogies for it, reminding us what

it was like before it had begun to implode,

then turn it into compost, until it’s as hot

as it was long before it became our abode.

Once all of the compost is scattered around,

the earth will organically be resurrected,

recomposing in silence surreally the sound

made by Elvis and Paul, while the Jews who’re suspected

of blowing up Towers will rise from the soil,

as Ezekiel predicted, and, as he once reckoned,

the earth will revive, till we run out of oil,

and blow it up with nuclear bombs in a second.

Truth is a force that can help us all to soar,

just as Philippe Petit did between gigantic Towers

on a tightrope, most amazingly, before

the Towers crashed, destroyed by evil powers,

remembered, although they can’t be repaired

just as can’t by false lies be the factual truth,

unlike the Temple when prophetically compared

by Amos to non-suckers’ Sukkah booth.

or Wisława Szymborska, the dead Polish poet,

who was by means of A. I. resurrected,

although since life depends on breath God gives us once we blow it,

Rambam says just our spirit will be posthumously detected.

Amos 9:11 states:

בַּיּ֣וֹם הַה֔וּא אָקִ֛ים אֶת־סֻכַּ֥ת דָּוִ֖יד הַנֹּפֶ֑לֶת וְגָדַרְתִּ֣י אֶת־פִּרְצֵיהֶ֗ן וַהֲרִֽסֹתָיו֙ אָקִ֔ים וּבְנִיתִ֖יהָ כִּימֵ֥י עוֹלָֽם׃

On that day I will set up again the fallen booth of David: I will mend its breaches and up its ruins anew.

I will build it firm as in the days of old,

Amazing in the context of this poem, is the fact that the verse by Amos on which the poem is pivoted is 9:11, serendipitously prefiguring the date dat of the destruction of the Twin Towers, 9/11/2001.

An “‘Interview’ With a Dead Luminary Exposes the Pitfalls of A.I.,” NYT, 11/3/24, Andrew Higgins, reporting from Kakow, Poland, writes:

When a state-funded Polish radio station canceled a weekly show featuring interviews with theater directors and writers, the host of the program went quietly, resigned to media industry realities of cost-cutting and shifting tastes away from highbrow culture.

But his resignation turned to fury in late October after his former employer, Off Radio Krakow, aired what it billed as a “unique interview” with an icon of Polish culture, Wislawa Szymborska, the winner of the 1996 Nobel Prize for Literature.

The terminated radio host, Lukasz Zaleski, said he would have invited Ms. Szymborska on his morning show himself, but never did for a simple reason: She died in 2012.

The station used artificial intelligence to generate the recent interview — a dramatic and, to many, outrageous example of technology replacing humans, even dead ones.

Mr. Zaleski conceded that the computer-generated version of the poet’s distinctive voice was convincing. “It was very, very good,” he said, but “I went to her funeral, so I know for sure that she is dead.”