April 22, 2025 • 12 mins
This is an episode from the podcast TED Tech, hosted by Sherrel Dorsey. We're sharing it with TANGOTI listeners as part of a feed swap with them, exchanging two episodes that address similar topics but land in very different places. We hope you enjoy it.
What if AI could bring the past to life? In this episode from the podcast TED Tech, host Sherrell Dorsey shares a talk from cartoonist Amy Kurzweil about how she helped train an AI chatbot on her late grandfather’s archives, allowing her to connect with a family member she never met — and discover family history she never knew. Backed by her own original drawings, she reveals the profound impact art and AI can have in keeping memories alive.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:04):
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this
is There Are No Girls on the Internet. I am
so excited about the upcoming season of There No Girls
on the Internet, and season five is launched on May thirteenth.
(00:24):
But in the meantime, I wanted to share an episode
from our friends over at the podcast ted Tech, hosted
by Cherrell Dorsey. So we've chosen a pair of episodes
from ted Tech and There Are No Girls on the
Internet that address the same topic from two totally different angles,
the use of tech to preserve the memory of someone
who is no longer with us. Back in March of
twenty twenty two, we published it There Are No Girls
(00:44):
on the Internet episode where I talked to spirituality writer
Brooke Obi about a hologram of the late Whitney Houston
doing a residency in Las Vegas. Too long didn't read.
We thought it was creepy af It felt like this crass,
capitalistic digital necromancy. If you listen to it back then,
I invite you to listen to it after this. But
in the ted Tech episode that you're about to hear
(01:05):
you'll hear a totally different perspective. Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil talks
about her own experience helping her father train an AI
chatbot to embody a lost relative and unveil a family history.
She never knew the fact that these two episodes are
about such similar topics but land in completely different places.
I find pretty interesting and I think it highlights the
complicated ways that AI is already changing our world. I
(01:27):
hope you enjoyed as much as I did, and if
you do, I invite you to check out other Ted
Tech episodes, And of course thanks for listening to their
No Girls on the Internet. And I hope you're as
excited as I am about the launch of season five
coming up on May thirteenth.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Art and technology are constantly interacting with each other, pushing
the boundaries of social expression and human representation. Consider the
use of digital archives and how that tech has evolved
our understanding of identity and legacy, or the rise of
AI as an artistic assistant limited only by our imagination.
(02:06):
By blending artistic expression with advanced technology, we can begin
to appreciate the vastness of the human experience in ways
previously unimaginable. These innovations invite us to rethink how we preserve, interpret,
and celebrate who we are, both in the present and
for future generations. This is TED Tech, a podcast from
(02:29):
the TED Audio collective. I'm your host Cherrell Dorsey. Our
speaker today is Amy Carsweil, an American cartoonist and writer.
Amy's recent work with AI and animated portraits exemplifies how
this tech has the potential to capture not just our likeness,
but our essence, immortalizing moments of humanity in new and
(02:53):
dynamic ways. But before we dive in a quick break
to hear from our sponsors, and now Amy Kurzweil takes
the TED stage.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I love being a cartoonist because I can travel anywhere.
I can visit historical artifacts and make improvements. I can
voyage to mysical lands and solve problems. I can bring
objects to life, and I can make those objects think
(03:37):
and talk, and I can send those objects wherever I
want them to go. I became a cartoonist to travel
through space and time, and I became a graphic memoirist
because the place I wanted to go was the past.
I come from a legacy of dramatic stories and lost characters.
(03:57):
My grandmother, Lily on my mother's side, was born in Warsa, Poland,
the oldest of four sisters. She was thirteen in nineteen
thirty nine when Nazi bombs raised her home and her
family was sealed to starve inside the Warsaghetto. Eventually, her
father encouraged her to slip through a hole in the wall,
(04:18):
and she survived the Holocaust on her own, hiding her
Jewish identity. This is the subject of my first book.
I wondered, what did my grandmother's lost home and lost
family look like. Her parents, her grandmother, and her sisters.
They are all gone without a trace. My father's parents
were luckier. They were also Jewish, and they both fled
(04:41):
Austria at the start of the war. My father's father, Fred,
was a pianist and conductor. In nineteen thirty seven, the
year before the Nazis marched into Austria, he was twenty
six and he conducted a magnificent choral concert at a
music hall in Vienna. A wealthy the American woman in
the audience was so impressed with his performance that she
(05:04):
later agreed to sponsor his visa to the US. So
music saved his life. But three decades later Fred died
of heart disease.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
I never met him.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
While alive, Fred meticulously preserved the documents of his life
a response to the threat of a rasure he fled
in Europe, and for decades after his father's death, my
father continued this preservation project. This is a subject of
my second book. You might know my father, ray Erzweil,
(05:42):
as an inventor and futurist. You should also know that
he's a person with an extraordinary sense of humor, and
although he's dedicated his mind to the future, his life
is full of the past. My father has worked for
decades on natural language processing, and several years ago you
realize that if we married AI with my grandfather's writing,
(06:04):
we could build a chatbot that writes in my grandfather's voice.
Back in twenty eighteen, this seemed very sci fi, But
rather than ushering in our demise, this project helped me
realize that AI could actually help us word off annihilation
(06:24):
by animating the legacies of our families and our cultures.
I wanted to talk to my grandfather because he, like me,
was an artist. I wondered could I get to know him.
Could I even come to love him, even though our
lifespans didn't overlap. So I got involved. This chatbot needed
(06:49):
language from my grandfather as much as could be found,
so I, with some assistants, said about finding his words
and transcribing them. This was a selective chatbot, meaning it
responded to questions with answers from the pool of sentences
that Fred actually wrote at some point in his life.
The more examples of Fred's writing we could find, the
more dynamic the experience of chatting the bot would feel.
(07:12):
Sometimes this transcription task proved challenging, but the more time
I spent with the symbols of my grandfather's life, the
more easily I could decode them. Finally, after much anticipation,
I sat down to chat with this new intelligence, an
(07:35):
algorithm commanding over six hundred typed pages of letters, lectures, notes, essays,
and other written documents from the grandfather I never met.
When I asked about Fred's dreams, he told me about
the challenge of keeping his new orchestra afloat. When I
asked about Fred's anxieties, I learned about the stress of
(07:58):
being a new father while working so hard. When I
asked about the meaning of life. Fred wrote about the
joy of working with other musicians in pursuit of beauty,
and he wrote about the highest aims of art. I
asked again about the meaning of life, because isn't that
really the best question for a robot? And Fred's second
answer was much simpler, but even better. Some of these
(08:23):
answers felt familiar to me. I remembered seeing them in
the archive, but the words gained impact through surprise and
the role play of conversation. I could identify patterns in
my grandfather's life and patterns across generations because I was
also an artist trying to make it in New York City,
and I also believed the meaning of life is art
(08:45):
and connection and love. I had wondered if this project
would feel like a resurrection, but rather than bringing my
grandfather from the past into the present, it felt like
I was the one time to visiting him for a
moment at different points in his life. And this kind
of time travel didn't feel like sci fi. It felt
(09:08):
like the kind of imaginative travel I do when I'm cartooning.
When I'm cartooning, I'm always thinking about how I could
possibly represent a person fully, and the answer is I can't. Similarly,
I know how many aspects of my grandfather can't be
captured by digital text alone.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
There's all those.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Quivers in his handwriting and what they denote about the
sensations in his body. There's his body, how it moved
and how it felt. There's his music and all the
ineffable aspects of his performance. And of course there's everything
he thought but didn't write down. What would we have
to do to be able to capture all of this?
(09:53):
I may fail as an artist to fully represent a
person's constantly evolving complexity, but I can ask what features
of a person are essential to who they are across
the lifetime. The puzzle of personal identity is one of
our oldest philosophical questions. So I'm not here to solve
that one for you. I'm just a cartoonist, after all.
(10:15):
I do believe that we are more than our bodies,
that the projects and impressions we leave behind are a
part of our essential selves. And I think AI has
a special role to play in the mission of memory.
I did not come to see the chatbot of my
grandfather as replacing my grandfather. I came to see it
(10:38):
as one way to interact with his legacy. As somebody
who has spent their whole life trying to document people,
I can assure you that people are much bigger and
weirder than anyone depiction or anyone moment in time can
possibly evoke. And I can also assure you that people
don't just disappear when they die. AI swirls our conception
(11:03):
of time and space. It can remix and extend our identities.
Our own digital archives are growing beyond belief, and we
need a framework for understanding technologies of representation. So I
offer you mine. Just like the comics I've drawn about
the characters in my life, these technologies are animated portraits.
(11:26):
They are one part of our true, immortal selves seen
this way. AI, like cartooning and all good artistic endeavors,
could help us appreciate the vastness of humanity if we
let it.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
That was Amy Karsweil at TED twenty twenty four, and
that's it for today. TED Tech is part of the
TED Audio collective. This episode was produced by Nita Bird Lawrence,
edited by Elejandra Sola's Are in fact Check by Julia Dickerson.
Special thanks to Maria Lautius Fera de Grange, Daniello Bellarrezo
(12:07):
and Roxanne Hilsch. I'm Charrelle Dorsey.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Thanks for listening in
There Are No Girls on the Internet, as a production
of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative. I'm Bridget Todd, and this
is There Are No Girls on the Internet. I am
so excited about the upcoming season of There No Girls
on the Internet, and season five is launched on May thirteenth.
(00:24):
But in the meantime, I wanted to share an episode
from our friends over at the podcast ted Tech, hosted
by Cherrell Dorsey. So we've chosen a pair of episodes
from ted Tech and There Are No Girls on the
Internet that address the same topic from two totally different angles,
the use of tech to preserve the memory of someone
who is no longer with us. Back in March of
twenty twenty two, we published it There Are No Girls
(00:44):
on the Internet episode where I talked to spirituality writer
Brooke Obi about a hologram of the late Whitney Houston
doing a residency in Las Vegas. Too long didn't read.
We thought it was creepy af It felt like this crass,
capitalistic digital necromancy. If you listen to it back then,
I invite you to listen to it after this. But
in the ted Tech episode that you're about to hear
(01:05):
you'll hear a totally different perspective. Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil talks
about her own experience helping her father train an AI
chatbot to embody a lost relative and unveil a family history.
She never knew the fact that these two episodes are
about such similar topics but land in completely different places.
I find pretty interesting and I think it highlights the
complicated ways that AI is already changing our world. I
(01:27):
hope you enjoyed as much as I did, and if
you do, I invite you to check out other Ted
Tech episodes, And of course thanks for listening to their
No Girls on the Internet. And I hope you're as
excited as I am about the launch of season five
coming up on May thirteenth.
Speaker 2 (01:44):
Art and technology are constantly interacting with each other, pushing
the boundaries of social expression and human representation. Consider the
use of digital archives and how that tech has evolved
our understanding of identity and legacy, or the rise of
AI as an artistic assistant limited only by our imagination.
(02:06):
By blending artistic expression with advanced technology, we can begin
to appreciate the vastness of the human experience in ways
previously unimaginable. These innovations invite us to rethink how we preserve, interpret,
and celebrate who we are, both in the present and
for future generations. This is TED Tech, a podcast from
(02:29):
the TED Audio collective. I'm your host Cherrell Dorsey. Our
speaker today is Amy Carsweil, an American cartoonist and writer.
Amy's recent work with AI and animated portraits exemplifies how
this tech has the potential to capture not just our likeness,
but our essence, immortalizing moments of humanity in new and
(02:53):
dynamic ways. But before we dive in a quick break
to hear from our sponsors, and now Amy Kurzweil takes
the TED stage.
Speaker 3 (03:13):
I love being a cartoonist because I can travel anywhere.
I can visit historical artifacts and make improvements. I can
voyage to mysical lands and solve problems. I can bring
objects to life, and I can make those objects think
(03:37):
and talk, and I can send those objects wherever I
want them to go. I became a cartoonist to travel
through space and time, and I became a graphic memoirist
because the place I wanted to go was the past.
I come from a legacy of dramatic stories and lost characters.
(03:57):
My grandmother, Lily on my mother's side, was born in Warsa, Poland,
the oldest of four sisters. She was thirteen in nineteen
thirty nine when Nazi bombs raised her home and her
family was sealed to starve inside the Warsaghetto. Eventually, her
father encouraged her to slip through a hole in the wall,
(04:18):
and she survived the Holocaust on her own, hiding her
Jewish identity. This is the subject of my first book.
I wondered, what did my grandmother's lost home and lost
family look like. Her parents, her grandmother, and her sisters.
They are all gone without a trace. My father's parents
were luckier. They were also Jewish, and they both fled
(04:41):
Austria at the start of the war. My father's father, Fred,
was a pianist and conductor. In nineteen thirty seven, the
year before the Nazis marched into Austria, he was twenty
six and he conducted a magnificent choral concert at a
music hall in Vienna. A wealthy the American woman in
the audience was so impressed with his performance that she
(05:04):
later agreed to sponsor his visa to the US. So
music saved his life. But three decades later Fred died
of heart disease.
Speaker 1 (05:17):
I never met him.
Speaker 3 (05:19):
While alive, Fred meticulously preserved the documents of his life
a response to the threat of a rasure he fled
in Europe, and for decades after his father's death, my
father continued this preservation project. This is a subject of
my second book. You might know my father, ray Erzweil,
(05:42):
as an inventor and futurist. You should also know that
he's a person with an extraordinary sense of humor, and
although he's dedicated his mind to the future, his life
is full of the past. My father has worked for
decades on natural language processing, and several years ago you
realize that if we married AI with my grandfather's writing,
(06:04):
we could build a chatbot that writes in my grandfather's voice.
Back in twenty eighteen, this seemed very sci fi, But
rather than ushering in our demise, this project helped me
realize that AI could actually help us word off annihilation
(06:24):
by animating the legacies of our families and our cultures.
I wanted to talk to my grandfather because he, like me,
was an artist. I wondered could I get to know him.
Could I even come to love him, even though our
lifespans didn't overlap. So I got involved. This chatbot needed
(06:49):
language from my grandfather as much as could be found,
so I, with some assistants, said about finding his words
and transcribing them. This was a selective chatbot, meaning it
responded to questions with answers from the pool of sentences
that Fred actually wrote at some point in his life.
The more examples of Fred's writing we could find, the
more dynamic the experience of chatting the bot would feel.
(07:12):
Sometimes this transcription task proved challenging, but the more time
I spent with the symbols of my grandfather's life, the
more easily I could decode them. Finally, after much anticipation,
I sat down to chat with this new intelligence, an
(07:35):
algorithm commanding over six hundred typed pages of letters, lectures, notes, essays,
and other written documents from the grandfather I never met.
When I asked about Fred's dreams, he told me about
the challenge of keeping his new orchestra afloat. When I
asked about Fred's anxieties, I learned about the stress of
(07:58):
being a new father while working so hard. When I
asked about the meaning of life. Fred wrote about the
joy of working with other musicians in pursuit of beauty,
and he wrote about the highest aims of art. I
asked again about the meaning of life, because isn't that
really the best question for a robot? And Fred's second
answer was much simpler, but even better. Some of these
(08:23):
answers felt familiar to me. I remembered seeing them in
the archive, but the words gained impact through surprise and
the role play of conversation. I could identify patterns in
my grandfather's life and patterns across generations because I was
also an artist trying to make it in New York City,
and I also believed the meaning of life is art
(08:45):
and connection and love. I had wondered if this project
would feel like a resurrection, but rather than bringing my
grandfather from the past into the present, it felt like
I was the one time to visiting him for a
moment at different points in his life. And this kind
of time travel didn't feel like sci fi. It felt
(09:08):
like the kind of imaginative travel I do when I'm cartooning.
When I'm cartooning, I'm always thinking about how I could
possibly represent a person fully, and the answer is I can't. Similarly,
I know how many aspects of my grandfather can't be
captured by digital text alone.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
There's all those.
Speaker 3 (09:29):
Quivers in his handwriting and what they denote about the
sensations in his body. There's his body, how it moved
and how it felt. There's his music and all the
ineffable aspects of his performance. And of course there's everything
he thought but didn't write down. What would we have
to do to be able to capture all of this?
(09:53):
I may fail as an artist to fully represent a
person's constantly evolving complexity, but I can ask what features
of a person are essential to who they are across
the lifetime. The puzzle of personal identity is one of
our oldest philosophical questions. So I'm not here to solve
that one for you. I'm just a cartoonist, after all.
(10:15):
I do believe that we are more than our bodies,
that the projects and impressions we leave behind are a
part of our essential selves. And I think AI has
a special role to play in the mission of memory.
I did not come to see the chatbot of my
grandfather as replacing my grandfather. I came to see it
(10:38):
as one way to interact with his legacy. As somebody
who has spent their whole life trying to document people,
I can assure you that people are much bigger and
weirder than anyone depiction or anyone moment in time can
possibly evoke. And I can also assure you that people
don't just disappear when they die. AI swirls our conception
(11:03):
of time and space. It can remix and extend our identities.
Our own digital archives are growing beyond belief, and we
need a framework for understanding technologies of representation. So I
offer you mine. Just like the comics I've drawn about
the characters in my life, these technologies are animated portraits.
(11:26):
They are one part of our true, immortal selves seen
this way. AI, like cartooning and all good artistic endeavors,
could help us appreciate the vastness of humanity if we
let it.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
Thank you.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
That was Amy Karsweil at TED twenty twenty four, and
that's it for today. TED Tech is part of the
TED Audio collective. This episode was produced by Nita Bird Lawrence,
edited by Elejandra Sola's Are in fact Check by Julia Dickerson.
Special thanks to Maria Lautius Fera de Grange, Daniello Bellarrezo
(12:07):
and Roxanne Hilsch. I'm Charrelle Dorsey.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Thanks for listening in
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