Laughing to keep from [use input undefined]: ChatGPT, Jewish humor, and cultural erasure

Abstract

This paper uses the embodied, Jewish identities of its three authors, and the experimental methodology of kibbitzing as a form of collective inquiry and self-reflexive praxis in order to demonstrate the limitations of chatbots to produce humorous narratives from an explicitly Jewish epistemology. By contrasting the affordances of large language models (LLMs) and their associated chatbots with the context-based logics of Jewish joke craft and storytelling, this article goes on to demonstrate the risk of cultural erasure that is posed by the positivist, denotative meanings associated with ChatGPT’s attempts at producing jokes for, or about, Jews.