The Romance of AI: Discussing Love and Artificial Intelligence with Amy Kurzweil

The Technically Human Podcast

In today’s conversation, I sit down with Amy Kurzweil, the author of the new graphic memoir, Artificial: A Love Story.

Artificial: A Love Story tells the story of three generations of artists whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life. The story begins with the LLM generated chatbot that Amy’s father, the futurist Ray Kurzweil, created out of his father’s archive, but the story doesn’t start and end there. Instead, the story takes us on a journey through new questions that technologies are asking about what it means to be human. How do we relate to—and hold—our family’s past? And how is technology changing what it means to remember the past? And what does it mean to know--and to love--in the age of AI?

Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two graphic memoirs: Flying Couch, a NYT’s Editor’s Choice and Kirkus “Best Memoir” of 2016, and Artificial: A Love Story, forthcoming October 2023. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and she’s received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere. Her work has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” a four-part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, Longreads, Literary Hub, WIRED, and many other places. She’s taught writing and comics at Parsons The New School for Design, The Fashion Institute of Technology, Center for Talented Youth, Interlochen Center for the Arts, in New York City Public Schools, and in many other venues, and she currently teaches a monthly cartooning class to a growing community of virtual students all over the world.