Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil uses AI to reconnect with family in her latest book 'Artificial'

What if you could speak with your lost loved ones? Or even family members you’ve never met? With the emergence of AI it seems like almost anything is possible, and that “anything” can often come with a hefty dose of technophobia.

Of course, how AI is developed and used is ultimately up to the creator and user, and for award-winning cartoonist Amy Kurzweil and her father, renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurweil, their AI creation came from a place of love and familial connection.

Amy Kurzweil is appearing at the Savannah Book Festival to present her latest graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story. Kurzweil’s previous book, Flying Couch, examined her relationship with her mother and grandmother. Artificial is about Kurzweil’s famous father and her paternal grandfather who passed away ten years before she was born.

“I always knew I would write something about my father,” said Kurzweil over the phone. “I remember learning in a creative writing class that you’ve got two stories to tell—one about your mother and one about your father. He’s such a character and his work is so interesting.

It didn’t occur to me to write about my grandfather until this project, but it all fits together thematically because my grandfather is the one grandparent I never met, and he is such an interesting figure for my father because he died young, and my father has this unfinished relationship with him.”

Using AI to connect with lost loved ones

Kurzweil’s grandfather, Fredric Kurzweil, was an Austrian conductor, musician, and educator who fled Vienna from the Nazi’s in 1938 and relocated to America. He was saved by an American benefactor who admired his talent. Fredric (or Fred) passed away in 1970 when Ray Kurzweil was very young, so Ray came up with the idea to create a text-based chatbot named Fredbot, that could recreate having a conversation with his deceased father.

“The chatbot came around as the entry into my story of my grandfather and my father, and that’s when it became clear that this was a story worth telling, on that paternal legacy specifically,” said Amy Kurzweil. “It makes sense that the chatbot project is where my father located his energy for trying to continue a relationship with his father.”

The Kurzweils are known for hoarding, so Amy was tasked with poring through all of Fred’s materials that Ray saved including notes, letters, and sheet music, and entering it all into the Fredbot algorithm.

Amy describes Fredbot as working kind of like a Magic 8 Ball. While generative chatbots use all available language to create responses, Fredbot only uses phrases attributed to Fred that were fed to the machine. Amy was surprised by some of the responses she received from Fredbot when she spoke to it.

“There are passages, of course, that I encountered when I was speaking to the Fred bot that I had encountered before because I was a part of feeding this corpus of text to the algorithm and the way that this bot works, which I think is an important distinction,” explained Amy.

Amy received two different but equally poignant answers when she asked Fedbot what the meaning of life was.

“He started talking about directing a chorus and the experience of men and women working together in service of something greater than themselves because he was a conductor and often conducted choral concerts, the idea of voices coming together in unison. He also talked about bringing to life symbols on a printed page as a musician and I thought that was really moving because I realized that’s what I do, too.

Then another answer to the meaning of life is just simply ‘love,’ which I think you can't really get any better than that.”

Many people balk at the concept of recreating somebody and conversing with them using AI, and Amy is no stranger to her father being compared to a mad scientist.

“I've encountered that Frankenstein reaction from growing up with my father and his ideas, and I think I was very motivated to bring some of those ideas down to earth,” explained Amy. “I didn't grow up with a sense that my father had anything but a humanist perspective towards these things. I think his ideas and his predictions about the future are so surprising and there's so much change that it strikes people with fear and then they project these sort of Frankenstein visions, but I grew up with my father's ideas and not finding them so shocking because I just grew up with it my whole life. I always noticed the kind of spiritual humanist aspect of things, like my father is very optimistic about humanity and so I wanted to share my own artistic sensibilities to a project like this.”

As an artist, Amy was able to connect with her grandfather in other ways besides speaking to a chatbot. Amy worked on Artificial for seven years, and the process included painstakingly studying and recreating Fred’s materials through gorgeous illustrations until she felt like she almost knew him. Although the Fredbot project is on hold for the time being, Amy was happy to connect with her grandfather through a creative spark that seems to run in her family.

“It was a salient experience of feeling close to this person and I think that satisfies something, at least for the moment, for me.

Like her father, Amy never throws anything away—undeleted emails, old cartoon drafts, etc. Is there a possibility that somebody might create an Amybot in the future?

“I'm on the record authorizing Amybot, that's fine with me,” said Amy. “I don't feel self-conscious. If I'm not around I think I'm comfortable sort of letting go and maybe I have faith that in the future people are probably going to want to honor me in a charitable way.”

If You Go >>

What: Amy Kurzweil at the Savannah Book Festival

When: 2:20-3:15 p.m., Feb. 17

Where: 225 W. President St.

Cost: Free

Info: savannahbookfestival.org

This article originally appeared on Savannah Morning News: Savannah Book Festival hosts cartoonist-graphic memoirist Amy Kurzweil