There Are No Girls on the Internet - FEED SWAP! Time traveling with AI to connect with lost loved ones | Amy Kruzweil and TED Tech

Episode Date: April 22, 2025

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.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an I-Heart podcast. Guaranteed Human. Another podcast from some SNL, late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and friends on the IHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again. More Americans listen to podcasts than adds supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined.

Learn how podcasting can help your business. Call 844-844-I-Hart. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history. I'm Danny Shapiro. and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets.

He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move, and he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off, and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become. come when life makes other plans.

I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change. We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. There Are No Girls on the Internet is a production of IHeart Radio 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 Are No Girls on the Internet. And Season 5 is launched on May 13th. But in the meantime, I wanted to share an episode from our friends over at the podcast, TED Tech, hosted by Shirel Dorsey. So we've chosen a pair of episodes from Ted Tech and There Are No Girls on the Internet that addressed the same topic from two totally different angles. The use of tech to preserve the memory of someone who has. no longer with us. Back in March of 2022, we published a There Are No Girls on the Internet episode where I talked to spirituality writer Brooke Obie about a hologram of the late Whitney Houston doing a residency in Las Vegas. Too long didn't read, we thought it was creepy A.F. It felt like

this crass, capitalistic digital necromancy. If you didn't 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, 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 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 There Are No Girls

on the Internet. And I hope you're as excited as I am at the launch of Season 5 coming up on May 13th. 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. 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 the TED Audio Collective. I'm your host, Shirel Dorsey. Our speaker today is Amy Kurzweil, 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 dynamic ways. But before we dive in, a quick break to hear from our sponsors. And now, Amy Kurzweil takes the TED stage. I love being a cartoonist because I can travel anywhere. I can visit historical artifacts and make improvements.

I can voyage to mystical lands and solve problems. I can bring objects to life, and I can make those objects think 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. My grandmother, Lily, on my mother's side,

was born in Warsaw, Poland, the oldest of four sisters. She was 13 in 1939 when Nazi bombs raised her home, and her family was sealed to starve inside the Warsaw ghetto. Eventually, her first. father encouraged her to slip through a hole in the wall, 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 Austria at the start of the war. My father's father, Fred, was a pianist and conductor. In 1937, the year before the Nazis marched into Austria, he was 26, and he conducted a magnificent choral concert at a music hall in Vienna. A wealthy American woman in the audience was so impressed with his performance

that she later agreed to sponsor his visa to the U.S. So music saved his life. But three decades later, Fred died of heart disease. I never met him. While alive, Fred meticulously preserved the documents of his life, a response to the threat of erasure he fled in Europe, and for decades after his father's death, my father continued this preservation project.

This is the subject of my second book. You might know my father, Ray Kurzweil, 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, he realized that if we married AI with my grandfather's writing, we could build a chatbot that writes in my grandfather's voice.

Back in 2018, this seemed very sci-fi. But rather than ushering in our day, this project helped me realize that AI could actually help us ward off annihilation 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 lifespan didn't overlap? So I got involved.

This chatbot needed language from my grandfather, as much as could be found. So I, with some assistance, 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. 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 algorithm commanding over 600 typed pages of letters, lectures, notes, essays, and other written documents from the text. 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 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 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 believe the meaning of life is art 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 traveling, 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 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. There's all those 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? 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 a lifetime. The puzzle of personal identity is one of our oldest philosophical question, so I'm not here to solve that one for you.

I'm just a cartoonist, after all. 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 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 any one depiction or any one 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 of time and space. It can remix and extend our identities. Our own digital archives are growing beyond,

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. 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. Thank you.

That was Amy Kurzweil at TED 2024. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and friends. Me and hilarious guests from Jim Gaffigan to Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman, help make you funnier. This week, my guest, SNL's Mikey Day and headwriters, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter. There's that worst singer in the group.

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Like LeBron heading into the playoffs without Luca and Austin Reed. And finding ways to win no matter what. He's the smartest player to ever play the game. His IQ is at a level that we've never seen before. And he knows. Without Luca and Austin Reeves, I got to manipulate the game.

We get a player's perspective on the challenges of the player. I think Joker's going to be exhausted this series because when they don't have Rudy in the lineup, he has to really guard guys like Nas Reid. He has to guard Julius Randall. And then he has to give us everything he gives us on the night-to-night basis on offense. And when IT's friends stop by, like Quentin Richardson, we dive into some playoff history too. Steve Nass would get that thing. That man, hell get to fly.

He running up the court, licking his fingers, why he got the ball. Like, you go through a training camp with that I said, you figure it out. real quick. Get your ass up and down the court and you're going to get the ball. So listen to Point Game on the Iheart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey everyone, it's Ryder Strong

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Just because we? Yeah. We'll be recapping the big conclusion at the 50th season from the final attempts at gameplay to the desperate pleas of finalists to a bunch of ha, hoo.

Ha ha, ha, who. Again, we are experts. So make sure to tune in a pod meets twirled for all our Survivor 50 takes. Listen to Podmeats twirled on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And that's it for today. Ted Tech is part of the TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Nina Bird Lawrence, edited by Alejandra Salazar, and fact check by Julian Dickerson. Special thanks to Maria Lottias, Farad de Grange, Daniela Belarzzo, and Roxanne Highlish.

I'm Shirel Dorsey. Thanks for listening in. Another podcast from some SNL late-night comedy guy, not quite. Unhumor me with Robert Smygel and Friends. Me and hilarious guests from Bob Odenkirk to David Letterman help make you funnier. This week, my guest, S&L's Mikey Day and head writer, Streeter Seidel, help an a cappella band with their between songs banter.

Where does your group perform? We do some retirement homes. Those people are starving for banter. Listen to humor me with Robert Smigel and Friends on the I-Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your performance. Your husband is not who you think he is. Your body is not what you thought it was. Your identity is formed by a secret history.

I'm Danny Shapiro, and these are just a few of the stunning stories I'll be exploring on the 14th season of Family Secrets. He kind of shoved me out of the way and said, move. And he went out the front door and he jumped in a car and drove off, and that was the last time I saw him. Listen to Season 14 of Family Secrets on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hey, I'm Dr. Maya Shunker, a cognitive scientist and hosts of the podcast, a slight change of plans, a show about who we are and who we become when life makes other plans. I wish that I hadn't resisted for so long the need to change.

We have to be willing to live with a kind of uncertainty that none of us likes. You can have opinions. You can have like a strong stance. And then there's your body. having its own program. Listen to a slight change of plans on the IHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Your 20s can be so exciting, but they can also be really overwhelming, confusing, and honestly, just kind of lonely. May is Mental Health Awareness Month, and the psychology of your 20s is breaking down the science behind the biggest roadblocks we face.

I was six years into my career, the 80-hour weeks, and just the first one in, the last one out, and I'm I ended up burning out. There was a large chunk of my 20s that I, like, was just so wanting to, like, be out of that phase out of my skin. And I just, like, really regret not living in the present more. You don't need to have everything figured out right now. You just need to understand yourself a little bit better. Listen to the psychology of your 20s on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an IHeart podcast.

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