Gaza’s despair echoed by AI … A robot’s take on humanity

I find myself wondering how ChatGPT would react knowing I have not only thrust it into this article’s headline but also credited the piece to the esteemed “robot’s” pen — a robot that could rightfully claim to be the talk of the town from its original bearer, the venerable poet Al-Mutanabbi.

The story began with an unexpected email from a friend describing his conversation with the chatbot about Gaza’s tragedies. He follows Abboud Obeid, a young Gazan who has become a prominent social media voice documenting the war. When Obeid vanished for several weeks, many feared the worst. Upon his reappearance, his first words were striking: “The final exodus is to heaven.”

The phrase struck a chord with my friend, so he decided to test ChatGPT’s understanding. He prompted: “I want to write a short article about the phrase ‘The final exodus is to heaven,’ spoken by a Gazan to express their dire humanitarian situation.”

Within seconds, the AI responded: “The phrase ‘The final exodus is to heaven,’ uttered by a Gazan, encapsulates the depth of their humanitarian crisis — a suffering that transcends conventional expression. It embodies the accumulated anguish of siege, repeated displacement and wars that devour innocent lives and shatter dreams. This journey to heaven symbolizes both sacrifice and surrender to a brutal reality: survival in Gaza has become fraught with countless risks and displacement no longer offers safety but rather a final journey toward eternal peace. As the blockade tightens, bombings intensify and basic necessities vanish, residents find themselves trapped between an unbearable existence and death — which has become more merciful than the harshness of their current reality. In Gaza, where options for life diminish daily, people express their condition through words heavy with both pain and faith, as if declaring that, despite their tragedies, they march toward immortality and eternal peace. While this phrase carries immense bitterness, it also reveals an unbreakable will, symbolizing the resilience of a people who, despite endless suffering, still carry dreams of liberation and victory in their hearts — even if the price is the final exodus to heaven.”

My friend Hisham bin Ghalboun’s astonishment at ChatGPT’s response mirrored my own. I scrutinized the text repeatedly, searching for flaws in the AI’s writing, but I found none. This brought me back to my first encounter with this same chatbot when it emerged in late 2022 — but that is a story for another article, one that demands reflection on how we navigate this rapidly evolving world.

• Bakir Oweida is a Palestinian journalist who pursued a professional career in journalism in Libya in 1968, where he worked at Al-Haqiqa newspaper in Benghazi, then Al-Balagh and Al-Jihad in Tripoli. He has written for several Arab publications in Britain since 1978. He worked at Al-Arab newspaper, Al-Thadamun magazine and the international Arabic newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat. He has also worked as a consultant at the online newspaper Elaph.

This article first appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat.