Abstract
This paper argues that contemporary discourse on Artificial Intelligence (AI) is structured by a persistent narrative archetype: the Golem. Originating in the medieval Kabbalistic traditions of Iberia and later flourishing in Ashkenazi folklore, the Golem story migrated into 20th-century European culture through Paul Wegener's seminal 1920 film Der Golem, wie er in die Welt kam. This cinematic translation secularized the archetype, transforming it into a parable of technological creation and control. Through a comparative structural analysis, this paper identifies four core homologies between the Golem plot and the AI paradigm: the protocol of creation, animation by linguistic code, the instability of literal-minded service, and the imperative for a pre-embedded termination command. The analysis demonstrates that the Golem functions not as a mystical metaphor but as a narrative algorithm—a reusable story logic that provides an essential hermeneutic for diagnosing the alignment problem, value misgeneralization, and the corrigibility crisis in AI development. The paper concludes that the ancient story offers a critical ethical schema, emphasizing that the power to create an agent must be inseparable from the wisdom and means to control it.
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