New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil was on Illinois State University’s campus this week, meeting with students and giving the keynote address at the AI and the Humanities conference on Wednesday.
Her latest book, called Artificial: A Love Story, centers around a chatbot spearheaded by her father, inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who was heavily involved with the development of artificial intelligence [AI].
“My father likes to boast that he’s the person who’s been in AI the longest,” Kurzweil said in an interview for WGLT’s Sound Ideas. “Sixty-four years, or something like that. But of course, if anyone out there has been in AI longer than that, they can write to him and complain.”
On the surface, Amy Kurzweil's career has been the opposite of her father’s. She studied creative writing. Every cartoon is handmade.
“But I actually don’t see that much of a dichotomy between my father’s work and my work,” she said. “I think that we’re both involved in creation, invention—and we both care a lot about artistry. Human artistry is not opposed to technology, and I think that’s one of the arguments that I’m really trying to make with my book.”
Artificial: A Love Story is a graphic memoir built around conversations with Kurzweil’s late grandfather, Fredric Kurzweil, through a chatbot generated from his archives.
“My grandfather died in 1970. He was an immigrant from Vienna; he fled the Nazis. He raised my father and a family in New York and then died before I was born,” Kurzweil said. “So, I never met him, and my book is really about trying to get to know my grandfather through the things that he left behind.”
The AI answers questions in Fredric Kurzweil’s voice, drawing from a vast archive of papers and physical artifacts Amy Kurzweil helped catalog and digitize. It’s a selective model, in part because generative AI was in its infancy when the project began in 2018.
“I found that limitation to be really meaningful and interesting,” she said, “because it was a way for me to engage more closely with the source material.”
In essence, the model transports Kurzweil into the past, rather than bringing her grandfather into the present.
“Less Frankenstein,” she said, but doesn’t oppose “leveling up” now that generative AI is widely available.
“I’m interested in using generative AI to make the experience more artful, more seamless, more useful,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean that I want the AI to just pretend to be my grandfather.”
In a recent Aeon paper, Kurzweil and co-author Daniel Story posit AI conversations with the dead are “participatory theater experiences,” in which participants must be acutely aware that the experience is fictional.
“I think that’s another misconception people have in this space,” she said. “They think people go into these experiences expecting it to be like a resurrection. If and when people have that expectation, it is uncanny, and they are freaked out and disappointed.”
In the case of “Fredbot,” Kurzweil said the limitations of the chatbot were useful in solidifying the experience as artificial and imagined—a quality of AI Kurzweil suggests is important in applying it to all sorts of situations. AI can now compose music, create art and do journalism (sort of). That humanmade innovation can feel threatening to humans, who tend to be less efficient, fewer in number, more expensive to employ, and occasionally, less intelligent.
Kurzweil said AI is a choice, not a mandate.
“Just because a machine can draw you a cartoon doesn’t mean it should,” Kurzweil said. “The New Yorker is not outsourcing their cartoons to AI. I think that’s been pretty clear. That’s not something people have to do. We act like we’re not in control of the things we use this technology for, but we actually are. The thing that’s really the threat is profit seeking over other values. That’s always been the threat to the arts, because the arts are not profitable.”
“If we only made decisions because we were going to make more money, then no humans would have jobs in the arts,” she said. “That is a real possibility if people make decisions merely based on profit. So, we have to introduce new values into these spaces. That’s what I’m trying to do.”
Learn more about Amy Kurzweil at amykurzweil.com, which includes links to her Patreon and options to purchase Artificial: A Love Story and her first book, Flying Couch.
