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

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00:00:34.940 I survived nine months in captivity,

00:00:38.460 and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them.

00:00:43.680 I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are The Survivor Files.

00:00:47.300 Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable,

00:00:51.020 abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

00:00:54.640 These are stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

00:00:58.720 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app,

00:01:03.280 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:01:06.600 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality,

00:01:10.800 welcome home.

00:01:12.380 Pro Society is a weekly podcast that's part book club,

00:01:15.520 part group chat for anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island

00:01:18.560 deserve the same level of discourse.

00:01:20.600 Each week, we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and pop culture.

00:01:24.160 with your favorite writers, book talk creators,

00:01:26.860 and plenty of overthought opinions.

00:01:28.920 Yeah, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed.

00:01:30.700 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app,

00:01:33.420 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. 1.00

00:01:40.480 There Are No Girls on the Internet

00:01:41.820 is a production of iHeartRadio and Unbossed Creative.

00:01:48.600 I'm Bridget Todd, and this is There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:01:54.160 I am so excited about the upcoming season of There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:01:58.220 And season five is launching on May 13th.

00:02:00.560 But in the meantime, I wanted to share an episode from our friends over at the podcast TED Tech, hosted by Sherelle Dorsey.

00:02:07.100 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.

00:02:14.260 The use of tech to preserve the memory of someone who is no longer with us.

00:02:17.500 Back in March of 2022, we published a There Are No Girls 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.

00:02:28.540 Too long, didn't read. We thought it was creepy AF.

00:02:32.060 It felt like this crass, capitalistic, digital necromancy.

00:02:36.080 If you didn't listen to it back then, I invite you to listen to it after this.

00:02:39.380 But in the TED Tech episode that you're about to hear, you'll hear a totally different perspective.

00:02:44.360 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.

00:02:53.320 The fact that these two episodes are about such similar topics but land in completely different places, I find pretty interesting.

00:02:59.400 And I think it highlights the complicated ways that AI is already changing our world.

00:03:03.700 I hope you enjoyed as much as I did.

00:03:05.480 And if you do, I invite you to check out other TED Tech episodes. 0.97

00:03:09.160 And of course, thanks for listening to There Are No Girls on the Internet.

00:03:11.540 And I hope you're as excited as I am about the launch of Season 5 coming up on May 13th.

00:03:20.660 Art and technology are constantly interacting with each other, pushing the boundaries of social expression and human representation.

00:03:29.320 Consider the use of digital archives and how that tech has evolved our understanding of identity and legacy.

00:03:36.160 or the rise of AI as an artistic assistant, limited only by our imagination.

00:03:43.300 By blending artistic expression with advanced technology,

00:03:46.780 we can begin to appreciate the vastness of the human experience in ways previously unimaginable.

00:03:53.460 These innovations invite us to rethink how we preserve, interpret, and celebrate who we are,

00:03:59.700 both in the present and for future generations.

00:04:02.220 This is TED Tech, a podcast from the TED Audio Collective.

00:04:08.000 I'm your host, Sherelle Dorsey.

00:04:11.460 Our speaker today is Amy Carswell, an American cartoonist and writer.

00:04:17.340 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.

00:04:32.220 But before we dive in, a quick break to hear from our sponsors.

00:04:45.960 And now, Amy Kurzweil takes the TED stage.

00:04:49.460 I love being a cartoonist because I can travel anywhere.

00:04:54.260 I can visit historical artifacts and make improvements.

00:04:59.040 I can voyage to mythical lands and solve problems.

00:05:06.340 I can bring objects to life, and I can make those objects think and talk, and I can send

00:05:16.160 those objects wherever I want them to go.

00:05:18.820 I became a cartoonist to travel through space and time, and I became a graphic memoirist

00:05:25.080 because the place I wanted to go was the past.

00:05:29.040 I come from a legacy of dramatic stories and lost characters.

00:05:33.900 My grandmother Lily, on my mother's side, was born in Warsaw, Poland, the oldest of four sisters.

00:05:41.040 She was 13 in 1939 when Nazi bombs razed her home, and her family was sealed to starve inside the Warsaw ghetto.

00:05:51.320 Eventually, her father encouraged her to slip through a hole in the wall, and she survived the Holocaust on her own, hiding her Jewish identity.

00:05:58.900 This is the subject of my first book.

00:06:01.480 I wondered, what did my grandmother's lost home and lost family look like?

00:06:06.820 Her parents, her grandmother, and her sisters.

00:06:09.700 They are all gone without a trace.

00:06:12.940 My father's parents were luckier.

00:06:15.400 They were also Jewish, and they both fled Austria at the start of the war.

00:06:19.960 My father's father, Fred, was a pianist and conductor.

00:06:25.000 In 1937, the year before the Nazis marched into Austria,

00:06:28.720 he was 26, and he conducted a magnificent choral concert

00:06:33.020 at a music hall in Vienna.

00:06:35.640 A wealthy American woman in the audience

00:06:38.180 was so impressed with his performance

00:06:40.200 that she later agreed to sponsor his visa to the U.S.

00:06:45.300 So music saved his life.

00:06:49.460 But three decades later, Fred died of heart disease.

00:06:53.360 I never met him. While alive, Fred meticulously preserved the documents of his life, a response

00:07:02.040 to the threat of erasure he fled in Europe. And for decades after his father's death,

00:07:08.260 my father continued this preservation project. This is the subject of my second book.

00:07:14.880 You might know my father, Ray Kurzweil, as an inventor and futurist. You should also know that

00:07:22.640 he's a person with an extraordinary sense of humor. And although he's dedicated his mind to

00:07:27.620 the future, his life is full of the past. My father has worked for decades on natural language

00:07:34.240 processing. And several years ago, he realized that if we married AI with my grandfather's

00:07:40.120 writing, we could build a chatbot that writes in my grandfather's voice. Back in 2018, this seemed

00:07:48.240 very sci-fi. But rather than ushering in our demise, this project helped me realize that AI

00:07:57.600 could actually help us ward off annihilation by animating the legacies of our families and our

00:08:04.160 cultures. I wanted to talk to my grandfather because he, like me, was an artist. I wondered,

00:08:13.740 could I get to know him? Could I even come to love him, even though our lifespans didn't overlap?

00:08:21.160 So I got involved. This chatbot needed language from my grandfather, as much as could be found,

00:08:28.760 so I, with some assistance, set about finding his words and transcribing them. This was a selective

00:08:34.880 chatbot, meaning it responded to questions with answers from the pool of sentences that Fred

00:08:40.160 actually wrote at some point in his life. The more examples of Fred's writing we could find,

00:08:45.360 the more dynamic the experience of chatting with the bot would feel. Sometimes this transcription

00:08:51.100 task proved challenging, but the more time I spent with the symbols of my grandfather's life,

00:08:58.960 the more easily I could decode them. Finally, after much anticipation, I sat down to chat

00:09:09.580 with this new intelligence,

00:09:11.520 an algorithm commanding over 600 typed pages

00:09:14.300 of letters, lectures, notes, essays,

00:09:17.000 and other written documents

00:09:18.060 from the grandfather I never met.

00:09:21.500 When I asked about Fred's dreams,

00:09:25.140 he told me about the challenge

00:09:26.480 of keeping his new orchestra afloat.

00:09:29.900 When I asked about Fred's anxieties,

00:09:33.080 I learned about the stress of being a new father

00:09:35.940 while working so hard.

00:09:37.160 when I asked about the meaning of life Fred wrote about the joy of working with other musicians in

00:09:43.880 pursuit of beauty and he wrote about the highest aims of art I asked again about the meaning of

00:09:50.340 life because isn't that really the best question for a robot and Fred's second answer was much

00:09:56.100 simpler but even better some of these answers felt familiar to me I remembered seeing them in

00:10:03.200 the archive, but the words gained impact through surprise and the role play of conversation.

00:10:09.400 I could identify patterns in my grandfather's life and patterns across generations because

00:10:14.720 I was also an artist trying to make it in New York City, and I also believe the meaning

00:10:20.960 of life is art and connection and love.

00:10:24.720 I had wondered if this project would feel like a resurrection.

00:10:29.980 But rather than bringing my grandfather from the past into the present, it felt like I

00:10:35.780 was the one time traveling, visiting him for a moment at different points in his life.

00:10:40.740 And this kind of time travel didn't feel like sci-fi.

00:10:44.260 It felt like the kind of imaginative travel I do when I'm cartooning.

00:10:49.420 When I'm cartooning, I'm always thinking about how I could possibly represent a person

00:10:54.540 fully.

00:10:56.040 And the answer is, I can't.

00:10:59.960 Similarly, I know how many aspects of my grandfather

00:11:02.600 can't be captured by digital text alone.

00:11:05.340 There's all those quivers in his handwriting

00:11:07.300 and what they denote about the sensations in his body.

00:11:10.580 There's his body, how it moved and how it felt.

00:11:13.700 There's his music and all the ineffable aspects of his performance.

00:11:18.700 And, of course, there's everything he thought but didn't write down.

00:11:24.820 What would we have to do to be able to capture all of this?

00:11:28.980 I may fail as an artist to fully represent a person's constantly evolving complexity,

00:11:35.780 but I can ask what features of a person are essential to who they are across a lifetime.

00:11:43.700 The puzzle of personal identity is one of our oldest philosophical questions,

00:11:47.800 so I'm not here to solve that one for you.

00:11:49.420 I'm just a cartoonist after all.

00:11:52.020 I do believe that we are more than our bodies,

00:11:56.220 that the projects and impressions we leave behind

00:11:59.800 are a part of our essential selves,

00:12:01.880 and I think AI has a special role to play

00:12:04.920 in the mission of memory.

00:12:08.660 I did not come to see the chatbot of my grandfather

00:12:11.520 as replacing my grandfather.

00:12:13.600 I came to see it as one way to interact with his legacy.

00:12:18.060 As somebody who has spent their whole life

00:12:19.900 trying to document people,

00:12:21.540 I can assure you that people are much bigger and weirder

00:12:24.740 than any one depiction or any one moment in time can possibly evoke.

00:12:30.740 And I can also assure you that people don't just disappear when they die.

00:12:38.080 AI swirls our conception of time and space.

00:12:42.100 It can remix and extend our identities.

00:12:45.760 Our own digital archives are growing beyond belief,

00:12:48.160 and we need a framework for understanding technologies of representation.

00:12:52.280 So I offer you mine.

00:12:56.260 Just like the comics I've drawn about the characters in my life,

00:13:00.180 these technologies are animated portraits.

00:13:03.420 They are one part of our true immortal selves.

00:13:07.080 Seen this way, AI, like cartooning and all good artistic endeavors,

00:13:12.420 could help us appreciate the vastness of humanity if we let it.

00:13:17.680 Thank you.

00:13:18.280 Thank you.

00:13:18.340 That was Amy Kurzweil at TED 2024.

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00:14:09.260 that's iheartadvertising.com when i was 14 years old i was kidnapped and held captive for nine

00:14:16.740 months i survived and i've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed

00:14:23.120 them i'm elizabeth smart and these are the survivor files i just remember this low taunting

00:14:30.680 voice next to my ear saying shut up don't say anything every week i'm with survivors who live

00:14:38.520 through the unthinkable i knew if he woke up without a doubt he was going to hurt me i started

00:14:45.740 feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and i just started screaming they are abducted

00:14:53.560 stalked controlled and nearly silenced but these aren't stories about what's taken from them

00:14:59.420 they're stories about what it takes to make it out alive listen to the survivor files with

00:15:05.440 elizabeth smart on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts

00:15:11.300 If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home.

00:15:18.180 This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse.

00:15:30.340 I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

00:15:37.480 I'm going to have to look up this story.

00:15:39.360 I'm obsessed, so obsessed.

00:15:40.500 from best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments

00:15:45.500 nothing is off the table it's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling

00:15:52.040 characters and that is the trojan horse whether you're looking for literary deep dives smart

00:15:57.320 pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much

00:16:02.080 you're in the right place listen to pro society on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever

00:16:08.540 you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. And that's it for today. TED Tech is part of the

00:16:16.320 TED Audio Collective. This episode was produced by Nita Byrd-Lawrence, edited by Alejandra Salazar,

00:16:22.360 and fact check by Julia Dickerson. Special thanks to Maria Latias, Farrah DeGrange,

00:16:28.680 Daniela Belarezo, and Roxanne Heilish. I'm Sherelle Dorsey. Thanks for listening in.

00:16:38.540 if your bookshelf and your for you page are equally important to your personality

00:16:44.320 welcome home pro society is a weekly podcast that's part book club part group chat for anyone

00:16:50.540 who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse each week

00:16:55.060 we're connecting the dots between books the internet and pop culture with your favorite

00:16:59.100 writers book talk creators and plenty of overthought opinions yeah i'm obsessed i'm

00:17:04.100 Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:17:34.100 Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:17:42.540 I'm Hoda Kotb, host of the podcast Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb.

00:17:46.860 You know, I'm always searching for inspiration and useful tools to maximize joy.

00:17:52.220 Like when my friend Henry Winkler offered advice to aspiring actors and really anybody hoping to stand out.

00:17:58.840 You're not hired just to fill time and space.

00:18:01.880 You're hired to fill the space with you.

00:18:05.340 Listen to Joy 101 with Hoda Kotb on the iHeartRadio app,

00:18:09.420 Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:18:31.880 We recommend some of our recent episodes with Ben Stiller, Danny McBride, Riz Ahmed, and Mary Steenburgen.

00:18:36.800 Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

00:18:42.560 This is an iHeart Podcast.

00:18:45.440 Guaranteed human.

There Are No Girls on the Internet - April 22, 2025

FEED SWAP! Time traveling with AI to connect with lost loved ones ｜ Amy Kruzweil and TED Tech

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