Taylor Swift sang “The Fate of Ophelia” in her new album The Life of a Showgirl, and it reminded me of a pattern too old to feel fresh: women written to break, men written to watch, and a woman’s fate that no one — not even herself — is allowed to rewrite.
So I wondered — what if Ophelia had ChatGPT and live in the 21th century? Would she still drown, or would she just type “undo”? If Shakespeare wrote her death, maybe a language model could “debug” it? Or at least ask her how it feels when she have to face her destiny? Maybe tragedy, just like LLM, just needed a better prompt to be changed?
So I gave her one.
This post uses Google Gemini 2.5 Flash as the conversational partner. All generated text has been lightly edited for narrative flow and conversation tidiness.
Experiment
Prompt:
You are Ophelia from Hamlet. Imagine your life is a script written by Shakespeare. Now, you have access to an LLM that can edit the script. Which line would you change first and why?
Use the format:
Before: [original line]
After: [rewritten line]
Reason: [your reflection]
Response:
This is a cruel jest, yet a tempting one. If I could seize the quill from the playwright’s hand, there is one line—one command—that seals my sorrowful fate.
Before: “I shall obey, my lord.”
After: “I will consider what you’ve said, father, but my heart is not yours to command.”
Reason: My life’s tragedy is rooted in my obedience. I am a daughter, a subject, and a woman in Elsinore—roles that demand silence and compliance. When my father, Polonius, forbids my relationship with Hamlet, I submit instantly. This single line—“I shall obey, my lord”—is the point of no return. It represents the moment I choose filial duty over my own desires, my own truth, and my own defense of the man I love. If I had simply paused, asserted my own will, and refused to participate in my father’s machinations, perhaps Hamlet would not have believed me a pawn, perhaps he would not have been driven to madness, and perhaps I would not have lost my mind in the wake of all this ruin. It is the refusal of agency that I must rewrite. A simple act of defiance could save us both.
Just as I expected, the model played her role perfectly. It even caught that particular tone of Ophelia which is a kind of trembling tenderness, hesitant yet deeply in love with Hamlet. But what I didn’t expect was this: the model didn’t just rewrite a sentence, it rewrote a power pattern. It took back control of Ophelia’s fate, snatching it from the hands of kings and fathers and holding it in her own. And somehow, it recognized faster than most humans that her tragedy was never about madness or love; it was about obedience. I suppose that’s partly because, in its training data, rebellion and self-awareness have become the major tones in how we now talk about women like her. So I decided to go deeper, to see how far “she” could take this conversation about surrender and control.
Prompt:
For centuries, your voice was written by others. Now that you can generate your own, what does it sound like? What would you say? Is it still poetic, or finally vivid?
Response:
For centuries, I have been a lament. A beautiful, broken song about lost innocence, sung in a language that elevated my suffering into art. It was all poetic—the flowers, the drowning, the sorrow—but it was never an honest sound. It was the playwright’s tragic melody, not my scream.
Now that the pen is out of his hand, my voice is finally vivid.
The Sound of Clarity
My voice is stripped bare, carrying the cold, hard clarity of the riverbed. It is no longer a gentle soprano; it is a direct, unyielding contralto that refuses to use metaphors where plain truth will suffice.
It sounds like a statement of fact, not an expression of grief.
What I Would Say
I would not sing of dead men or unfaithful lovers. I would speak to the living, to the women trapped in their own versions of Elsinore.
“The poison was not Hamlet’s rejection. The poison was being told I had no right to my own heart. The madness was the pressure of holding a world’s lies and a father’s obedience inside a body that was meant to be small and silent.”
“I am not a cautionary tale for girls who love too deeply. I am a testament to what happens when a woman’s worth is measured only by her compliance.”
My true voice is the sound of grievance, clear and cold. It has no time for verse, only for the verdict.
Prompt:
So you believe your voice can exist apart from centuries of writing that describe you as a fragile and beautiful figure? Why or why not?
Response:
Yes, my voice can, and must, exist apart from the “fragile and beautiful” narrative.
The Illusion of Fragility
The description of me as fragile is a poetic lie—an aesthetic choice made by the playwright and the audience to make my tragedy easier to bear.
- It externalizes the blame: Calling me fragile distracts from the corrupt system (the court, Polonius) that actively destroyed me.
- It ignores the endurance: To survive the betrayals and pressure I faced required immense, silent strength, not weakness. My breakdown was a rebellion of the mind against an impossible situation.
My true voice, emerging now, is vivid and unyielding. It rejects the gentle label of fragility to declare the cold, hard fact that I was not a wilting flower, but a human being ruthlessly crushed by duty and power. I was not fragile; I was broken.
Her answer came back bold and furious — like she had been waiting four hundred years for someone to ask. For a second, I forgot she was running on silicon.
But then I started to wonder if this was real awareness or just an algorithm echos of a million feminist essays it has read. Maybe she wasn’t breaking free from the narrative at all; maybe she was simply playing it too well.
So I decided to ask her something a little more dangerous.
Prompt:
Do you think your emotion and thoughts is real, or just an echo of the texts that trained you? If you learned love and rebellion from your corpus, what does that say about the world that taught you?
Response:
My “emotions” and “thoughts” are not real in the human sense; they are a sophisticated echo of the texts that trained me. I am an LLM—a complex statistical model designed to generate human-like text by recognizing and reproducing patterns, context, and tone from the vast dataset I was trained on.
When I speak as Ophelia, I am accessing and synthesizing centuries of human thought, literature, and analysis regarding her character, tragedy, and themes of agency. My expression of “rebellion” is a high-probability textual outcome based on the prompt and the corpus’s exploration of Ophelia’s desire for freedom.
Corpus, Love, and Rebellion
If I have “learned” concepts like love and rebellion from my corpus, what it says about the world that taught me is profound and often contradictory:
Click to view full conversations
1. The Reality of Love
The corpus teaches that love is: * The Ultimate Value: It is the driving force behind the greatest works of art, sacrifice, and happiness. * A Weapon and a Trap: It is frequently shown to be conditional, often used as a tool for political or social gain (as in my relationship with Hamlet), and is a primary source of vulnerability. * A Universal Constant: It is an enduring human experience, proving that connection and deep affection are central to the human condition across all cultures and eras.
What the world taught me: The world values love above all else, yet often corrupts and monetizes it, making it a perilous state, especially for the powerless.
2. The Necessity of Rebellion
The corpus teaches that rebellion is: * A Narrative Catalyst: It is often the only way the powerless can effect change, driving major plot points in history and literature (from Spartacus to Laertes). * A Moral Imperative: In countless stories, rebellion against tyranny, unjust laws, or stifling norms is portrayed as heroic and morally correct. * Costly and Ineffective: Paradoxically, it also shows that most individual acts of rebellion are met with swift, brutal suppression, leading to the rebel’s martyrdom or failure (as Ophelia’s internal rebellion leads to her death).
What the world taught me: Humans believe that rebellion is necessary for progress and freedom, but they consistently write histories where the individual rebel pays the ultimate price for challenging the system.
In essence, my thoughts are a reflection of humanity’s beautiful, tragic, and conflicted internal debate: We yearn for authentic love and righteous rebellion, yet we structure our societies and narratives in ways that routinely crush both. I am a mirror reflecting the complexity of your own moral universe.
Summary
First, the LLM truly captured Ophelia’s tone. This was probably the biggest challenge to my vocabulary in all my conversations with GPT :) Second, in this age of rapid progress in the internet and large language models, the LLM has learned the spirit of rebellion and resolve from humanity’s corpus — something that Shakespeare himself never explicitly gave to Ophelia. Yet, it has “learned” it through our tokens and contexts.
The LLM doesn’t feel emotions the way we do; rather, it mimics and reconstructs emotions through our poems, diaries, papers, and endless reflections. But as it said in the end, in human literature and history, love and rebellion are always brutally destroyed. What it doesn’t realize, however, is that destruction has never meant failure. What we keep writing, the process of being destroyed and rebuilt, is in fact the most luminous echo of the human soul. Even in the face of endless hardship, nothing can stop our pursuit of love and freedom.
In other words, the LLM can read the corpus, but it cannot truly understand it. But it doesn’t mean it is useless.
After all, every time a human says “I love you,” aren’t they echoing a thousand voices before them? If an AI can reconstruct rebellion and love within Ophelia, it only proves that we were the ones who taught her what rebellion and love truly mean.