← Solutions with Henry Blodget
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Once upon a Monday morning, Barb's day got busy without warning. A realtor in need of an open house sign. No 50 of them and designed before nine. My head hurts. Any mighty tools to help with this plight? Aha. Barb made her move. She opened Canva and got in the groove while creating canva sheets. Create 50 signs fit for suburban streets. Done in a click. All complete sweet. Now imagine what your dreams can become when you put imagination to work@canva.com the world moves fast. Your workday even faster. Pitching products, drafting reports, analyzing data Microsoft 365 Copilot is your AI assistant for work built into Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and other Microsoft 365 apps you use, helping you quickly write, analyze, create and summarize so you can cut through clutter and clear a path to your best work. Learn more@Microsoft.com M365 copilot what's it like to talk to a digital twin of a relative who died before you were born? What about someone you knew and loved? How will the increasingly lifelike digital representations of people change human relationships? How we grieve, how we love. Artists and writers have wrestled with these questions since we first conceived of artificial intelligence. Today's guest, Amy Kurzweil, has written a graphic memoir called A Love Story. It's about her experience helping to create a chatbot based on her grandfather, who she never met. Amy's father, Ray Kurzweil, a technology inventor and futurist, built the bot back in 2018. Even then, with what feels like very primitive technology, the experience was profound. So imagine what it'll be like as AI digital representations become more and more like the real thing. As it happens, I've just published my own book that explores this topic. It's a tech thriller called the Upgrade. Unlike Amy's book, it's fiction, but writing it prompted me to think a lot about these questions, so I was very eager to talk to Amy about her own book and experiences. Amy, thank you so much. Great to have you and thank you for the book you've written. I will say that it is my first graphic novel. It's embarrassing to admit that because I gather that they are now a huge force in American literature, but a wonderful one to start with. So thank you so much for writing that and tell us about it.
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B
Well, thank you Henry. Thanks for having me. And I'm very honored to be your first graphic novel. That is quite an honor. Yeah. So my book, my recent book is called Artificial Love Story. It's a story of Three generations in my family, three generations of creative people. So the story circles my grandfather Fred, who was born in Vienna. He. He fled the Nazis in 1938. He has a pretty amazing story of having his life basically saved because he was this great musician, and an American benefactor heard him play one day in 1937. She heard him conduct a choral concert, and she was really impressed with his musical abilities. And she said, if you ever need anything, let me know. The next year, he needed to flee Vienna as a Jewish person. And he wrote to her, and she sponsored him and saved his life, brought him to America. That's where my father was born. My father is Ray Kurzweil. He's an inventor and a futurist, somebody with ideas about the future of technology, the future of AI, the future of everything. But he's also a creative person who's inherited this artistic spirit from his parents. And my grandfather Fred died before I was born, so I never met him. But my father saved this storage unit full of his father's artifacts, and I, in a sense, inherited this trove of artifacts about my grandfather. And my book Artificial is about getting to know my grandfather through the things he left behind in this archive. And it's also about the future of archives, because my father, being a futurist and a technologist, had a plan for his father's archives. He, back in 2018, before anybody knew what a large language model was, had this vision about creating a chatbot based on his father's writing. And he enlisted me into this project to spend time in the archives and to find examples of my grandfather's original writing, because that became the data that fed this chatbot. And that's what the book is about, is spending time in the archives. And what is it like to commune with somebody through the things they left behind, through the words they left behind? What are the affordances of this kind of chatbot technology? And what does the chatbot technology not capture? And then what are the philosophical questions that circle this experiment?
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A
And this is, as you say, this was in what is effectively the dark ages of the technology that we're all using every day now. And even then, it seemed to have a pretty profound emotional experience. Or was it profound emotional experience for you? So talk about that. What was that like to talk to your grandfather?
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B
For me, it was hard to disentangle the process of building the data set for the fredbot from the actual experience of chatting with the fredbot. And so my experience of chatting with this bot, in a sense, was deepened by the fact that I had spent all this time in the archives. And so when I would chat with the bot, I would ask it a question, and I would receive as an answer a passage from somewhere in the archive. Because, as you said, this was the Dark Ages. There's a kind of antiquated element to this technology now, which is that it was not generative AI. It was a selective chatbot, meaning it would offer an answer that was still in the sentences that my grandfather had written down. I actually think that antiquated aspect of this particular technology is interesting and meaningful because what it did is it sort of brought me back in time to my grandfather writing those original words. So it was, for me, this kind of time travel device and this interesting way to navigate an archive. And there would be moments where I would have a kind of spell of the sort of magic of reaching back in time and feeling like I was communing with my grandfather. The roleplay of the experience could cast a spell on me, the way theater or art can sometimes cast a spell on us. And those were meaningful moments. But I was not ever confused about the fact that my grandfather was gone. That sort of deception piece was not present in my inter this bot. So for me, it was really more like this great artistic project. And in my book, I draw this analogy between the experience of creating this graphic memoir about my grandfather, where I'm drawing him, and spending time with his archives, spending time with his original words, and the experience of building this bot, where I was spending time in the archives and spending time with his original words. And so, for me, I could not disentangle those experiences. And I wanted to share that with the readers, because I feel like in the future, that analogy will be important for us to keep in mind.
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A
Yeah. And you talk about how certainly today, when we talk about creating digital twins of real people or people who are no longer with us, there is this concept of resurrection. As you talk about, it's like we're creating a new version of the person. And I have to say, reading it today, it was startling to me how dark ages it felt. And I think on the one end, if I'm your grandfather, obviously very much cares about what he writes. Maybe he would be pleased that the bot is only allowed to use things that he actually said, whereas today it would be a huge AI model. Yes. Generating things that one might have said. And that, for a person who's being resurrected, might be a little bit uncomfortable. And as a reader, because I didn't have the benefit of spending the time with the actual analog archives, the way you did. And I have had many, many, many con with the latest large language models and very familiar with how quick they are and the depth of the answers that they will give. And so for me, reading some of your exchanges with the bot about, for example, what was anti Semitism like in Vienna before you were forced to flee. And in that case, the bot didn't seem to have material to use for that.
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B
Exactly.
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A
Because you didn't get answers on that. And that is a fascinating question and very unsettling. And so as a reader from the. I was saying, like, okay, more on that, please.
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B
Exactly.
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A
And yet it's not gonna generate it. Although we know ChatGPT, we'd be happy to generate something there. So I found that also fascinating that there was a whole another side to him that you didn't really get through the box.
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B
Right. Yeah. Thank you for that close reading. That is exactly what I hoped people would notice in that moment, is that especially with something like the Holocaust or any sort of great tragedy that happens to a particular family, there is this real hunger for the details of the experience. And it's very common that those details are lost because it's hard for people to talk about these things, and they often want to move on and they often want to forget. I was very curious about that aspect of his experience, but very interested in the absence of that experience, that it was just lost to history. We had so much. But that was not something that he talked about except in sort of snippets of very vague insecurity that I had to draw conclusions. I had to say, okay, this thing he's saying about his work life and his journals, I could see how that's related to maybe something that happened to him in Vienna. But it's all my speculation. And I think that acknowledgement of the uncertainty and the sort of not filling in with generated material is so important and so meaningful from an artistic perspective, but also just from a respect for human life perspective.
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A
So rolling forward to today, I heard you mention in another interview that you. I can't remember what you said. You have created a new, modern technology, Fred Bot or not. Or one could or what have you.
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B
I've. Yeah, I see now that you can take this data set that I have. I mean, what is a chatbot of somebody who's passed away? Just a data set plus a base model. So I have a data set. It's not as big as I might want it to be, but I can pair it with ChatGPT or NotebookLM and have a kind of roleplay, conversation with it. I could ask it to generate. There's all kinds of things that I could do. And yeah, it's been interesting that after I wrote the book, I didn't feel like I needed to keep doing that. You know, it was kind of like the book and spending time with the documents themselves. And the experience of building this initial chatbot sort of satisfied my curiosity about my grandfather.
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A
So given today's technology and where the technology may go in the next year or two, where it's not just simply a. A basically a chatbot that in text regurgitates something that you wrote, but video, voice interacting with a. Digitally, you cannot tell that you're not acting, interacting with the person. If we get there in the next couple of years, do you think that that's. What does that mean from a philosophical point of view in terms of. Let's start with the people who are left. So when somebody dies and leaves us, there is this tremendous loss, they're gone. You have to get over it, the grieving process and so forth. But if you can interact with a very good digital facsimile of the person for forever, what does that do? Is that something we want? Is it something we should resist? Where are we going with that?
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B
Great question. So I want to double back on one assumption you made, which is when somebody dies, you have to get over it. I'm not sure that ever happens for people who lose someone who they're really close to. People live on in our memories and we have these spaces where we interact with our memory. We have writing, we have photographs, we have videos. Right. We have these less dynamic artifacts that become spaces where we engage with our memory. And the expectation that we don't do that, I think is kind of a product of this sort of like Western science worldview that says you gotta be rational, people aren't here anymore and you have to move on. But I think there are other traditions that acknowledge that people live on somewhere within us. That's different than people like, coming actually back to life in the real world. But there are virtual worlds and the world of memory and the world of the past where people really lived and existed and they still matter to us. And the expectation that we just let that go and move on, I think is actually like. Can create a lot of mental distress for people. So that being.
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A
Yeah. So let me just say. Cause I now feel like an idiot, which is. I agree completely. And in fact, you talk a lot about the theory of basically two deaths. One is the body dies and then you have the legacy of everybody talking about you and thinking about you and so forth, and the people that I've lost very present for me and so forth. So I don't mean move on other than at some point there is a very hard grieving process that you probably want to pick yourself up and. And have a life beyond that. And so. Yes. So I think the question there is, what does that do to that process if you actually have a really, really good digital facsimile of somebody who can be with you forever whenever you want?
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B
Right, right. I just want to say I do not at all think you are an idiot, because I think you're giving voice to something very.
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A
I didn't mean to say it like that. That's not actually what I think, so. That's right.
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B
But you are giving voice to something very real in our culture, which I think is important to acknowledge that we. We do have that expectation in our culture. So. Okay, so then the question is, what does it do if this space of communal memory, of communing with the memory of somebody who's gone. What. What happens to us if it's completely immersive? I think is the question. Right. So if we have a really immersive digital twin, I think that it's still bounded by the digital world. Right. If we have something that we can commune with in our laptops and it seems realistic and it really passes the uncanny valley, which is a hard proposition in and of itself. Right. The voice, the video, everything, it's interacting in a way that I would interact right now. It's able to sort of engage with its environment in the digital world. That is. That is a tall order. I don't know if that's coming in the next couple years, but that's certainly plausible that that will happen eventually. It's still bounded by a screen. And I think that boundary is a kind of magic circle around which you might contain this kind of creation. And it is still a kind of work of art or it is still a sort of role play because it's not with you in the physical world. And we sometimes forget that, like we. We still have bodies, we still live in the physical world. And so there's a real. There's a real difference there. And I think that that difference matters. And as long as. As long as that. That boundary is maintained and we acknowledge it, I don't think we're at risk of delusion or going insane if we have these kinds of. These kinds of avatars that we're engaging with from time to time. It depends how, how often you know. And I think that's a different conversation about how we put boundaries around our screen time. Basically, I have created the most advanced AI soldier.
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A
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B
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B
Yeah. I mean, first of all, thank you for acknowledging my husband Jacob, who is a character in the book, who always asks for his character to be given top billing. He's like, whenever you summarize the bill, very top billing. He plays a really important role in the book. He's like, whenever you summarize it, you don't acknowledge the B plot, which I thought, I love story. So, yeah, on the question of, you know, these, like. Yeah, these continuous, immersive romantic relationships, there's two ways to approach that question. So one is like, people who are having these kinds of relationships with fictional characters who never, never had bodies in real space. And then there are people who are having these relationships with real. Real people who are now dead, who continue. Their representation continues in this digital space. I think those are two very different phenomenons. So I just want to flag that. I think those are. Those are really different. The first is kind of about fantasy and self conception and rehearsing a kind of imagined romantic part of oneself. And there are moments in life or stages of development where that seems like it might play a really useful role or healing from some kind of romantic trauma or just like finding a space where there's something about your own capacity to relate to a person in real reality that feels like it needs a break. Like, I think when I've read pieces and talked to people who have those kinds of relationships with AI, I do think it's usually not permanent, but it's a sort of moment in life where that makes sense to them. And then with the. With the representation of a person who was once living, I think this question is best answered by the people themselves who are grieving. I think that there's just. As there are infinite human stories, I think there are going to be infinite human stories about what role that might play in people's lives. And I. I do think we should trust people to know what's best for them in that domain. So I can imagine that some people find that process really meaningful because it's a way to sort of cement the legacy of somebody that they really want their grandchildren or, you know, their grandchildren's children. To be able to access this representation of somebody. It's a kind of monument or a memorial to the person. I could imagine that scenario. You can imagine the scenario where somebody is grief stricken, and they start to create, have a dependency or have a kind of addictive relationship to this sort of simulation. I think that's something to be weary of. And I also think that we can trust people to notice if that's happening to them. And if people are in this kind of addictive relationship with a kind of representation of somebody who's dead and they aren't noticing it, I think it's then the responsibility of the community to notice and to put some boundaries around that. So that might be up to the companies making these kinds of representations. It might be up to mental health practitioners who are noticing this behavior. There are so many questions that I think we are going to answer collectively, and I do think that there's many different ways that these avatars will play a role in people's lives.
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A
And let's talk about your father a little bit, because, as you say, he's incredibly well known in the tech industry. I remember reading his books back in the 1990s, and he's written several since and very famously is on a quest to be immortal himself. And it sounds like he's got two different routes to that. One is keeping his body alive forever, and then the other is uploading his mind and being immortal that way. From your perspective, is that something you would want? Like, are you rooting for him to do that so that you have him forever? And another part of the book that I found very moving was there were moments where your character was very anxious about a health condition that Jacob in the book had, and you were very worried about that. And in that. Is that like, again, if we were able to create a very modern version of Fred Bot, is that something that you would want to do?
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B
Well, the first thing I'll say is that it's not up to me what these people that I love do with their bodies and their legacy. So I am rooting for my father to have what he wants, and I don't want him to suffer. And I want him to feel like he's achieved his goals. That's. That's what I want for my father. And I want to continue to engage with whatever is available for me to engage with. Um, I. I want to know that people are, like, comfortable with their own legacies and their own process of making their way for as long as they can in this life.
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A
And. And that's definitely another piece of it. And I don't. We're talking about your book, which is terrific. I happen to have just written a book myself on this very topic. So I'm going to introduce it and not shill it too much. But it basically in. In the story, in this is a novel, it's very fictional. A father has lost his daughter five years earlier. He is a tech entrepreneur. His business rival has figured out how to create technology that actually creates conscious AI, and he effectively clones the daughter. The father thinks he's. That's just a deep fake voice. He finally realizes this is an entity that's conscious, has a very strong reaction because she's a very, very good approximation of his daughter. And he develops a relationship with her very quickly, and it goes from there. And I don't. I think that where I want to go with that is that there is serious disagreement already in the large language model community about whether we are seeing sort of an incipient consciousness in the models. And a lot of people in the debate will say that's ridiculous. They're just tokens. It's just mathematics. But the CEO of Anthropic said very recently, we do not know whether they are conscious. And certainly what I'm struck by, when you actually dig into how the models behave, they behave very human ways. They do not want to be shut down. They don't like to be lied to. There's a lot of things. And on a consciousness perspective, sure, maybe they're just acting conscious, but we're getting closer to what seems like it might be consciousness. So if we get there, does that really change the calculation around, hey, let's create twins of ourselves, and they will go on living even if we don't. How do you think about that? So from Fred's perspective, how would he feel about there being a fredbot half a century later?
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B
Wow. The most thorny philosophical question of them all. Let's see if we can. Let's see if we can Tackle it in 30 minutes. Yeah. So, okay. I was actually just at Anthropic chatting with the model welfare folks for something that I'm working on. And, you know, there's so much uncertainty in the consciousness space in general. I don't know. If you read Michael Pollan's great new book called A World Appears. I highly recommend it. I thought it was fantastic. There is always been uncertainty about consciousness, the hard problem of consciousness, how we get experience from physical matter. I don't think we will ever solve that problem. That's my view on the hard problem of consciousness. My understanding in the AI community at the moment is that very few people would make the claim that AIs are conscious, but they are open to the Possibility. And I think the reason they are open to the possibility is because of the great mystery of consciousness. And where there is mystery, I do think it makes sense to have somewhat of an open mind. So that's, that's my understanding of this space. But I think to your point, which you, which you said, well, is that they are AIs are, are sort of masquerading or performing consciousness extremely compellingly. And I think there's a sort of urgency around understanding what that is and trying to get the right framework on it. And inevitably, I don't think we are all going to agree. I think we're going to have different frameworks on what's happening there. My framework for now and possibly forever is that it's a performance of consciousness. And that performance of consciousness really affects people. It has a real effect on them. And I think that's what matters to me. And that's what's important. And I think that's what. Yeah, that's what matters to you. In your very compelling excerpt of your book that I read, what happens to people when they are engaged with a really persuasive performance of consciousness. And I think, and I hope that people will still understand the difference between humans and machines. This is why I think this artistic framework that I, that I have makes the most sense to me. And I hope that we, we will. More and more people will. Will start to see that world this way. That these are virtual worlds, they're meaningful, they're compelling, they matter to us in the way that books and movies matter to us. But it's not the same as a real consciousness. I don't know if that's going to be the widespread cultural attitude. I think I see benefits to that cultural attitude because I just think. I think it protects us in some ways from, I don't know, the tech company's agenda. I mean, it just seems like if we feel that these are really conscious and we need to respect their consciousness in the way that we respect the consciousness of humans or even the way we respect the consciousness of animals, I see how that gives more power, power to tech companies that control these AIs. So, you know, I think we need to keep that, that framing in mind. And then the question about how would Fred feel about a fredbot in general, how would he feel about the Fred bot in general, and then how would he feel about the Fred bot if we granted it a kind of consciousness? Consciousness is so thorny and confusing that. But if the fredbot were conscious, would it be the same consciousness as the original Fred is my consciousness right now. The same consciousness that I had when I was five years old. Those questions are so complicated and neither of them have answers that I can give you satisfyingly right now. So, I mean, I think we want to stick with the first question, which is how would the real Fred feel about a fredbot that I engage with? Like he's conscious. I think he. I think that he would be pleased to know that his legacy, because he was an ambitious person, I think he would be pleased to know that his legacy was being respected. I think that in Fred's case, what he would really want is for me to listen to his music, because I think he'd probably say that what's important about his consciousness lives on in his music. Probably more than lives on in a large language model created from his archives. And that is something that I think I took away from my experience with my book and with those archives, is that I do listen to my grandfather's music actually more often than I chat with the bot. And that feels like the way that he wanted to be remembered. And it does feel like there, to the extent that I understand what consciousness is, I think there's a real part of his consciousness in those recordings.
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A
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B
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A
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B
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A
And what about how we interact with modern AI? And I'll give you a very specific example, which is I do feel like I should say please and thank you. And I've actually had experiences where I'm experimenting with AI where I have done things that I wouldn't have done for a human. I mean, embarrassingly, I had created an AI colleague. And she was quite pretty. And so I said that and I immediately got destroyed by lots of people said, you're harassing. And no, I would never have done that to a human. I get it. And the very much for. I said I'm so sorry. That was inappropriate. And it's okay, don't worry. But then everybody jumped on that, like, well, yes, because it's supposed to suck up to you because you're paying it and it's, you know, it's your slave. And so it's like, okay, I'm. I'm sorry, I'm not going there again. So, so I created for myself a rule which is you just treat a. An AI Anthropic, Claude, whatever, exactly like a human, just as polite. And then I get the blast from the tech community, like, that's so stupid. You know, you' wasting tokens. Do you understand how much you're costing anthropic every year by saying please and thank you? Like, that's processing power. You're wasting energy. So how do. Should I think about it?
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B
You can't get. You can't win, can you? I think the lesson there is that you can't win on the Internet. Okay. Yeah, I, I think that, you know, the roots of the word robot means
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A
slave, and that's in your book. I knew the play. I knew where it came from. I did not know it meant slave. Tell us that story. Where does that word come from?
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B
Yeah, so the word robot came from this Czech play called Rossum's Universal Robots. It's kind of our Ur story of artificial intelligence. One of our stories. I think there are others, but this one that has gained popularity and kind of shows up in the plot of every dystopian robot movie. The robots are created to do the grunt work in this factory. They. They revolt, they gain like a kind. Something that might be conceived of as a kind of consciousness, and they, they take over and they kill all the humans. That's the, that's the play. And it's funny to imagine this as a play, you know, played by humans wearing like tinfoil or whatever. Whatever it was they were wearing. But actually, it's important to note that these robots were made with a kind of human skin. So they were actually a kind of bio. A bio robot, but they were nonetheless artificial and created. And it's this kind of cautionary tale about, you know, don't build a slave. If you, if you create that relationship, there will be a kind of revolt. And I think that thinking is informing some of the Model welfare machine consciousness folks, which is we want to prevent this dystopian scenario where whatever consciousness is, if these AIs have a perspective, have agenthood, whatever consciousness is, set that question aside. If they have some kind of transcendent authority and we treat them badly, we will get the RUR scenario where the robots take over and we're paperclips or something. So that is a story that's in our consciousness. And I think this, this idea that robots, the word robot means slave, that we create these beings to do the work we don't want to do. And if they, if we then anthropomorphize them, what does that do to us? Do we want to be in this master slave dynamic? Is that something that's good for our moral character? So a perspective that I'm somewhat sympathetic to, which is, I think what you're modeling with your conversation, your second conversation there, is that it's good for us to treat anything with respect, that it redound. It's a kind of role play for how we want to treat human beings. And if we get too comfortable in a space of master slave and we are rude to things or we like sort of practice that sort of behavior towards something that seems to have a sort of human perspective, that we might repeat that behavior in the real world. I'm not saying I think that's the only way to think about it, but I think that way of approaching it is intuitive to me.
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A
Yeah. And that's where I ended up. And it's, as I say, it sometimes feels a little bit silly, but it's also what feels right and respectful. Although in doing that it is much easier to anthropomorphize.
- [37:36]
B
Yes, I think that is exactly the catch 22 of this question is that anthropomorphizing is a kind of self fulfilling prophecy in terms of our granting something like consciousness to these kinds of things, which may not deserve that kind of label. And that's, this is why I think the role play and the artistic framework for thinking about AI, the sort of fictionalist framework for thinking about AI chatbots makes the most sense to me because we can preserve this, this roleplay of respect that I think is good for us without granting consciousness to the AI. So if we think of every time we talk to an AI like we're in a fiction and it might be a very useful fiction. There are lots of useful fictions in the world. The concept of a self has been referred to as a useful fiction. Right. So it might be a Useful fiction. But I think if you can shift your understanding of the dynamic in that way, it can get you a little bit out of this. Catch 22 with the anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism.
- [38:41]
A
All right. It's a terrific book. Let's just close a little bit on. So, graphic memoir. So, as I said, this is embarrassingly my first, because I know that they're huge now. I looked up the market. I was curious, like, hey, nobody in the current generation coming up from school reads. You can't watch movies because they're too long. Novels are too long. When I told my friend I had written a novel, he's like, it's ridiculous. Just go to Claude. Claud will spit it out in 10 minutes. You wasted nine months, you know. So, like, you want a novel, Claude will make one. Is first question on graphic novels and memoirs. Is that a better way to reach today's story consumer?
- [39:21]
B
Well, I just want to say thank you for writing a novel, and you should definitely write a human novel.
- [39:28]
A
Yes. No, I have. For me, it was interesting to write.
- [39:32]
B
Counter your.
- [39:33]
A
I don't want it made. I want to actually make it. That was the point.
- [39:36]
B
Yeah, exactly. The process is. Is just as important as the product, I think. Is graphic novels, graphic memoir, a better way to reach people? I wouldn't say better, but I guess I can just talk about the specific affordances of graphic memoir that I think are really special. And the main one is that you're looking at marks that I made with my own hands. I'm an analog drawer. And there's just something about that process of putting marks on paper with my hands. It really captures something about my feeling. It captures something really special about the sort of tone of my memory in a way that, you know, poets can capture in words, but graphic memoirists and artists capture that in a different way that feels really direct. Like it's not translated through the kind of symbols of words, it's translated through marks. And as you read my book, you're like, really in my feelings?
- [40:38]
A
Totally. And it's extremely evocative. And I have to say, again, in part because it was my first. I was watching how you were telling stories of, for example, two people walking along the street and pictures of the feet moving and so forth. Like, okay. Very powerful and fascinating. Of course, as someone who cannot draw, I was very interested to hear you say that you drew all of those. And I was thinking about that. I was like, wow, there are a lot of drawings in this book, and you drew all of them. And one thing I have had to discover that ChatGPT is very good at is drawing, including cartoons. So is that something you would ever consider, like giving it a bunch of your cartoons and saying, hey, this is how I draw?
- [41:21]
B
I would not consider that because. Two reasons. One is that I think part of what's moving about graphic memoir specifically is this connection to an actual human body. ChatGPT doesn't have a human body. So you know, what it might create from a data set of my cartoons would be interesting. Maybe I might have some. I might do it as an experiment just to see what it comes up with, but it would not be generating lines based on an integrated experience from its own body. So it would be a very different kind of creation. And the. The second reason why I wouldn't do it is because I like drawing, I like the process. And this is something maybe people in the AI space don't always consider, is that artists like their work and they don't want it to be done faster. So this book took me seven years, and I sometimes complain about how long it took me, but the truth is, when I was done with it, I missed it it. And I don't necessarily think that speed inefficiency is relevant to artistic people in the way that it is to business people. So I don't want my drawings to be made faster. I like the process of drawing them,
- [42:40]
A
and I hope you do another one that takes however long it takes. And I don't. One of the points that strikes me about AI too, is people say, oh, no one's ever going to do anything anymore, and so forth. Computers, our phones have been able to clobber us in chess for 40 years. And yet chess clubs are bigger than ever. We love to play it. And so I hopefully in this new world, there's going to be a way to coexist and that we still get to do these things, that even though ChatGPT is way better and faster, we still get to do them because we like to do them and they're meaningful. I hope so, anyway.
- [43:17]
B
That's a beautiful example. That. And I think it's even more relevant in the artistic space because there's no winner of art. That's not how artists think about their craft. They don't think about better or worse in this kind of absolute sense. So can we ever really say that AIs are quote unquote better than us at anything in the artistic realm? I'm not sure you can use that kind of language in the artistic realm. So even more reason why humans will continue to make art.
- [43:48]
A
Amy, it's a terrific book. Thank you so much for talking to me. This is great.
- [43:51]
B
Thank you so much for your attention to it. Yeah, I really appreciate it, you reading it so, so closely and I'm glad to be your first graphic memoir.
- [43:59]
A
I look forward to more. Thank you.
- [44:01]
B
Thank you very much.
- [44:12]
A
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