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Artificial: A Love Story
A visionary story of three generations of artists whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life
How do we relate to—and hold—our family’s past? Is it through technology? Through spirit? Art, poetry, music? Or is it through the resonances we look for in ourselves?
In Artificial, we meet the Kurzweils, a family of creators who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the center is renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long been saving the documents of his deceased father, Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938.
Once, Fred’s life was saved by his an American benefactor, impressed by Fred’s musical genius, sponsored his emigration to the United States. He escaped just one month before Kristallnacht.
Now, Fred has returned. Through AI and salvaged writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred’s voice, and he enlists his daughter, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance.
Amy’s deepening understanding of her family’s traumatic uprooting resonates with the creative life she fights to claim in the present, as Amy and her partner, Jacob, chase jobs, and each other, across the country. Kurzweil evokes an understanding of accomplishment that centers conversation and connection, knowing and being known by others.
With Kurzweil’s signature humanity and humor, in boundary-pushing, gorgeous handmade drawings, Artificial guides us through nuanced questions about art, memory, and technology, demonstrating that love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life.
How do we relate to—and hold—our family’s past? Is it through technology? Through spirit? Art, poetry, music? Or is it through the resonances we look for in ourselves?
In Artificial, we meet the Kurzweils, a family of creators who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the center is renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long been saving the documents of his deceased father, Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938.
Once, Fred’s life was saved by his an American benefactor, impressed by Fred’s musical genius, sponsored his emigration to the United States. He escaped just one month before Kristallnacht.
Now, Fred has returned. Through AI and salvaged writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred’s voice, and he enlists his daughter, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance.
Amy’s deepening understanding of her family’s traumatic uprooting resonates with the creative life she fights to claim in the present, as Amy and her partner, Jacob, chase jobs, and each other, across the country. Kurzweil evokes an understanding of accomplishment that centers conversation and connection, knowing and being known by others.
With Kurzweil’s signature humanity and humor, in boundary-pushing, gorgeous handmade drawings, Artificial guides us through nuanced questions about art, memory, and technology, demonstrating that love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life.
368 pages, Kindle Edition
Published October 17, 2023
28 people are currently reading
3030 people want to read
About the author
Amy Kurzweil
3 books58 followersAmy Kurzweil’s debut graphic memoir, Flying Couch will be published in October 2016. Her comics appear in The New Yorker and other publications. Her series GutterFACE is hosted by the literary webcast drDOCTOR and her short stories have appeared in The Toast, Washington Square Review, Hobart, Shenandoah, and elsewhere. She teaches writing and comics at Parsons School of Design and at the Fashion Institute of Technology. Amy lives in Brooklyn.
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February 19, 2024
What makes a person the same person over time? Is it our consciousness, the what-it’s-like to be us? Is consciousness like a light that’s either on or off?--------------------------------------
What remains of a person once they’ve died? It depends on what we choose to keep.Amy Kurzweil is a long-time cartoonist for The New Yorker. If the name sounds a bit familiar, but you aren’t a reader of that magazine, it may be because her father is Ray Kurzweil. He is a genius of wide renown. He invented a way for computers to process text in almost any font, a major advance in making optical character recognition (OCR) a useful, and ubiquitous tool. He also developed early electronic instruments. As a teenager he wrote software that wrote music in the style of classical greats. No gray cells left behind there. He happened to be very interested in Artificial Intelligence (AI). It helps to have a specific project in mind when trying to develop new applications and ideas. Ray had one. His father, Fred, had died when he was a young man. Ray wanted to make an AI father, a Fred ChatBot, or Fredbot, to regain at least some of the time he had never had with his dad.
Amy Kurzweil - Image from NPR - shot by Melissa Leshnov
Fred was a concert pianist and conductor in Vienna in the 1920s and 1930s. A wealthy American woman was so impressed with him that she told him that if he ever wanted to come to the USA, she would help. The Nazification of Austria made the need to leave urgent in 1938, so Fred fled with his wife, Hannah. (He had actually been Fritz in Austria, becoming Fred in the states.) He eventually found work, teaching music.
Artificial: A Love Story is a physically hefty art book, a tale told in drawings and text. Amy traces in pictures her father’s effort to reconstruct as much of his father’s patterns as possible. To aid in the effort there was a storage facility with vast amounts of material from his life both in Austria and in America. She joins into the enterprise of transcribing much of the handwritten material, then reading it into recordings which are used to teach/train the AI software. It is a years-long process, which is fascinating in its own right. She also draws copies of many of the documents she finds for use in the book.
Ray Kurzweil with a portrait of his father - image from The NPR interview - Shot by Melisssa Leshnov
But there is much more going on in this book than interesting, personalized tech. First, there is the element of historical preservation.
I always understood my father’s desire to resurrect his father’s identity as being connected to two different kinds of trauma. One is the loss of his father at a young age in a common but tragic scenario, with heart disease. The other trauma is this loss of a whole culture. Jewish life in Vienna was incredibly vibrant. Literally overnight it was lost. The suddenness of that loss was profound, and it took me a while to appreciate that. My great-aunt Dorit, who died this past year at 98, said they were following all the arbitrary protocols of the Nazis to save all this documentation. Saving documentation is an inheritance in my family that is a response to that traumatic circumstance. - from the PW interviewKurzweil looks at three generations of creativity, (Fritz was a top-tier musician. His wife, Hannah, was an artist. Ray was also a musician, but mostly a tech genius. Amy is a cartoonist and a writer.) using Ray’s Fredbot project as the central pillar around which to organize an ongoing discussion of concepts. In doing so, she offers up not merely the work of the project, but her personal experiences, showing clear commonalities between herself and her never-met grandfather. This makes for a very satisfying read. Are the similarities across generations, this stream of creativity, the impact not just of DNA, but of lived experience? Nature or nurture, maybe the realization of potential brought to flower by the influence of environment whether external (living in a place that values what one has to offer) or internal (families nurturing favored traits)?
Image from the book - posted on The American Academy in Berlin site
One could ask, “what makes us what are?” The book opens with a conversation about the meaning of life. But life is surely less determinative, less hard-edge defined than that. A better question might be what were the historical factors and personal choices that contributed to the evolution of who we have become?
Image from the book - it was posted in the NPR interview
Existential questions abound, which makes this a brain-candy read of the first order. Kurzweil looks at issues around AI consciousness. Can artificial consciousness approach humanity without a body? What if we give an AI a body, with sensations? Ray thinks that we are mostly comprised of patterns. What if those patterns could be preserved, maybe popped into a new carrier. It definitely gets us into Battlestar Galactica territory. How would people be any different from Cylons then? Is there really a difference? Would that signal eternal life? Would we be gods to our creations? If we make an AI consciousness will it be to know, love, and serve us? The rest of that catechistic dictat adds that it is also to be happy with him in heaven forever. I am not so certain we want our AIs remaining with us throughout eternity. As with beloved pets, sometimes we need a break. Are we robots for God? Ray thinks such endless replication is possible, BTW. Kurzweil uses the image of Pinocchio throughout to illustrate questions of personhood, with wanting to live, then wanting to live forever.
Every Battlestar Cylon model explained - image from ScreenRant
Persistence of self is a thread here. As noted in the introductory quotes, Kurzweil thinks about whether a person is the same person before and after going through some change. How much change is needed before it crosses some line? Am I the same person I was before I read this book? My skin and bones are older. But they are the same skin and bones. However, I have new thoughts in my head. Does having different thoughts change who I fundamentally am? Where does learning leave off and transition take over? Where does that self go when we die? Can it be reconstructed, if only as a simulacrum? How about experiences? Once experienced, where do those experiences go? These sorts of mental gymnastics are certainly not everyone’s cuppa, but I found this element extremely stimulating.
Kurzweil remains grounded in her personal experience, feelings, and concerns. The book has intellectual and philosophical heft, and concerns itself with far-end technological concerns, but it remains, at heart, a very human story.
As one might expect from an established cartoon artist who has generated more smiles than the Joker’s makeup artist, there are plenty of moments of levity here. Artificial is not a yuck-fest, but a serious story with some comic relief. It is a book that will make you laugh, smile, and feel for the people depicted in its pages. Amy Kurzweil has written a powerful, smart, thought-provoking family tale. There is nothing artificial about that.
I used to wonder if I could wake up into a different self. For all I knew, it could have happened every morning. A new self would have a new set of memories.Review posted - 01/12/23
Publication date – 10/17/23
I received a hard copy of Artificial: A Love Story from Catapult in return for a fair review.
This review is cross-posted on my site, Coot’s Reviews. Stop by and say Hi!
=============================EXTRA STUFF
Links to the author’s personal, FB, Instagram, and Twitter pages
Profile – from Catapult
AMY KURZWEIL is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere.Interviews
She has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for “Technofeelia,” her 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, WIREDand many other places. Kurzweil has taught widely for over a decade. See her website (amykurzweil.com) to take a class with her.
-----NPR - Using AI, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil connects with deceased grandfather in 'Artificial' by Chloe Veltman
-----Publishers Weekly - Reincarnation: PW Talks with Amy Kurzweil by Cheryl Klein
-----PC Magazine - How Ray Kurzweil and His Daughter Brought A Relative Back From The Dead By Emily Dreibelbis
——LitHub - Amy Kurzweil on the Open Questions of the Future by Christopher Hermelin
Songs/Music
-----The Jefferson Airplane - White Rabbit- referenced in Chapter 6
Items of Interest from the author
-----Artificial: A Love Story promo vid
-----The New Yorker - excerpt
-----New Yorker - A List of Amy Kurzweil’s pieces for the magazine
Items of Interest
-----Ray Kurzweil on I’ve got a Secret
-----A trailer for Transcendant Man, a documentary about Ray Kurzweil
-----WeBlogTheWorld - Amy interviews Ray in a Fireside Chat at NASA – sound is poor. You will need to ramp up the volume to hear – video – 23:07
-----Wiki on Battlestar Galactica
November 11, 2023
Things I could relate to here and there, but overall just a bunch of rambling (the same way I ramble to myself to be honest, which makes me feel less of an alien). It was also hard to follow at times as well.
Throughout reading this, I was constantly wondering and questioning if I should even continue writing a graphic novel about my family, and what they endured as Greeks fleeing Turkey.
Throughout reading this, I was constantly wondering and questioning if I should even continue writing a graphic novel about my family, and what they endured as Greeks fleeing Turkey.
January 14, 2024
In her other book, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir, Amy Kurzweil looked at the lives of her mother and maternal grandmother in way I found sloppy and unstructured. Here it's the lives of her father and paternal grandfather that Amy skitters between in her unfocused, disordered manner.
Her father is Ray Kurzweil, who is apparently a famous inventor and futurist. I was previously unfamiliar with him, but he comes off here as a real crackpot with daddy issues, obsessed with his own immortality and the resurrection of his father, Fredric, in some form of artificial intelligence, starting with the pretty dicey chatbot featured extensively in this book. Amy enables and caters to Ray's projects in hopes of connecting better with Fredric herself, but he pretty much remains a cipher throughout.
I was bored with all the jumbled details of her family and the flights of philosophical fancy they inspired in her. And I was annoyed that some proofreader didn't catch the misspellings of the names of Bess Myerson and Karel Čapek.
(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto NPR's Books We Love 2023: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels list.)
Her father is Ray Kurzweil, who is apparently a famous inventor and futurist. I was previously unfamiliar with him, but he comes off here as a real crackpot with daddy issues, obsessed with his own immortality and the resurrection of his father, Fredric, in some form of artificial intelligence, starting with the pretty dicey chatbot featured extensively in this book. Amy enables and caters to Ray's projects in hopes of connecting better with Fredric herself, but he pretty much remains a cipher throughout.
I was bored with all the jumbled details of her family and the flights of philosophical fancy they inspired in her. And I was annoyed that some proofreader didn't catch the misspellings of the names of Bess Myerson and Karel Čapek.
(Best of 2023 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto NPR's Books We Love 2023: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels list.)
December 2, 2024
This long, thoughtful, meditative comic unfolds the story of a family driven by creativity and invention, traits which have both saved and consumed their lives. The author's grandfather, Fredic, was a Jewish musician and conductor living in Vienna before WWII; his talent provided the connection he needed to flee to the US on the eve of war. He married and had two children before dying young. His son, Ray, became an inventor whose early experiments in machine learning and machine generated art and music, as well as various robotics, proceeded much of the invention we see today. In middle-age, Ray became obsessed with the idea of typing up all of his father's letters and journals and turning them into an AI chat-bot which he and his daughter could communicate with. Whether you find this meaningful or monstrous will depend a lot on your own personal relationship with AI. Honestly, I struggled to understand why someone would feel they could know a deceased loved one better by chatting with them through an algorithm (owned by an outside tech company, mediated by human and machine decisions) than by simply... reading the journals and letters. Ray's desire to create a digital simulacrum of his father, dead for fifty years, felt motivated by unprocessed childhood grief and folly. My understanding is that the majority of this book was written before our current Chat-GTP dominated era, so there is no discussion of how the majority of AI programs available today are built on stolen creative work and are already straining our energy grids and water resources. (Google recently proposed building seven new nuclear reactors, simply to power its AI). Please know that the comic does delve into more than this one topic; there are thoughts on the meaning of life, of health, death, immortality (through art or AI); on inherited family neurosis and memory. I think many people will find much to enjoy in this book. I simply found myself in such strong philosophical disagreement with so many of the ideas expressed by Ray that it was hard for me to focus on some of the other threads of the narrative. I would still recommend checking out the book if the themes seem interesting to you!
April 13, 2024
A lot of interesting ideas in Artificial, but the narrative is painfully scattered. The footnotes-style section at the end kind of explains the issue with the book: Amy Kurzweil had a lot of interesting stuff she wanted to write about (her dad, the Singularity, artificial intelligence, her dad's dad), but she mostly wanted to write about it in intense, almost encyclopedic detail. Unfortunately, that's not very conducive to a comic narrative, so she shoved all the details into the footnotes and cut cut cut aggressively from the storytelling in the main body of the book.
What we get then, is a vague plot about investigating her grandfather's origins through an odd early AI experiment that replicates a person's personality through their written word. There are so. many. tangents. And discussions with her father, Ray, who is admittedly quite weird and interesting! That's the whole book's deal, I guess. Weird and interesting, but in a way that puts you to sleep.
What we get then, is a vague plot about investigating her grandfather's origins through an odd early AI experiment that replicates a person's personality through their written word. There are so. many. tangents. And discussions with her father, Ray, who is admittedly quite weird and interesting! That's the whole book's deal, I guess. Weird and interesting, but in a way that puts you to sleep.
January 29, 2024
The most fun I had with this book was googling Ray Kurzweil and checking out his website, images, and stories through much more accessible means than are made available in this graphic memoir. It’s certainly a magnum opus and massive undertaking, but that doesn’t necessarily make it easy or engaging to read.
January 18, 2024
This broad and unfocused book nonetheless introduced me to Ray Kurzweil, who's someone I probably should have learned about already. Among other things, he came up with the concept of the Singularity. Interesting guy. But I couldn't figure out of the book was about him, or about his father, or about his efforts to create an AI version of his father, or his daughter's life being a part of this unique family. Like I said, the scope was too big. Also, I didn't like Kurzweil's style of illustration. 2.5 stars, but I'm rounding up to 3.
August 31, 2023
Wow, what a book!
July 11, 2025
'Artificial, una historia de amor' é unha novela gráfica contada dende o punto de vista da autora, onde nos relata a historia da súa familia en distintas xeracións e a relación desta coa IA, xa que o seu pai é un experto nela. Un relato bastante curioso sobre o amor, a familia e a Intelixencia Artificial. Curioso, dende logo...
Está ben para pasar o tempo e trae ao final un glosario bastante extenso a modo de "diccionario" con termos que trata na historia.
Está ben para pasar o tempo e trae ao final un glosario bastante extenso a modo de "diccionario" con termos que trata na historia.
December 14, 2023
This engaging graphic novel is for those who wonder, imagine, and reflect upon the meaning of life.
This is a love story, but it's one that is significantly more expansive in its complexity than we expect. It's an opus, an homage, to connection, meaning, expression, and experience.
If this evocative story teaches anything, it is that living is art. The nature of the soul can be neither captured nor contained, only known.
This is a love story, but it's one that is significantly more expansive in its complexity than we expect. It's an opus, an homage, to connection, meaning, expression, and experience.
If this evocative story teaches anything, it is that living is art. The nature of the soul can be neither captured nor contained, only known.
December 28, 2023
One of the most beautiful and moving books I’ve ever read.
May 12, 2024
Stunning
did-not-finish
March 29, 2024Stopped at 15%. I had a tough time following the thread of the story and actually settling into who is who because of the timeline jumps right away. The graphics were really good though.
January 23, 2025
It stands out so obviously when someone writes about the challenges of their life when every single one of their needs and wants are met. Personally, this has always been an issue with me reading philosophy, which I acknowledge- I don't CARE what the meaning, the purpose, the breakdown of life is. I cannot imagine living in a way where you are so concerned about conceptual existence when you have a choice between living in two homes each full of family. It feels so... blind.
Speaking of blind, there are so many pages that are unreadable. Repetition for the sake of style or making a point about computers/data is one thing, but pages and pages of microscopically different faces and walls of text just loses the point made in the book section. Most pages don't have numbers because of the sheer amount of text and ink filling in all the white space. I was so curious about the history of the author and her family, but I'm not sure if it was a technical issue with scanning the documents or just poor design, it's so difficult to sort through visually.
My takeaway from this is that the author needs a better editor and a step outside the tech-world bubble. Talk to a neighbor and feel, instead of just taking in and regurgitating data.
Speaking of blind, there are so many pages that are unreadable. Repetition for the sake of style or making a point about computers/data is one thing, but pages and pages of microscopically different faces and walls of text just loses the point made in the book section. Most pages don't have numbers because of the sheer amount of text and ink filling in all the white space. I was so curious about the history of the author and her family, but I'm not sure if it was a technical issue with scanning the documents or just poor design, it's so difficult to sort through visually.
My takeaway from this is that the author needs a better editor and a step outside the tech-world bubble. Talk to a neighbor and feel, instead of just taking in and regurgitating data.
January 12, 2025
Amy Kurzweil’s "Artificial: a Love Story” is a truly unique addition to the graphic novel genre: it is a beautifully drawn novel of ideas as well as a personal memoir. And, most of all, it is – true to its title – a love story.
The personal story begins to come into focus when the reader is told that Amy Kurzweil’s father, Ray Kurzweil, is one of the pioneering gurus not only of AI but also of the AI ideal of creating a “trans-human” AI personality, viz., a fully human personality independent of the body. Her achievement is her ability to illustrate, literally, the story of how she herself has struggled all her life to honor, understand, and philosophically discern her father’s AI legacy, which includes Ray’s attempts to use writings and recordings of his father’s (Amy’s grandfather) writings to create a “chat-box of the dead” -- an interactive AI personality created solely from Fred Kurzweil’s printed and recorded words. This thread of Kurzweil’s family story gives the reader a truly unnerving yet poignant glimpse into at least one facet of our looming “artificial” future. Kurzweil shows great vulnerability as she creates a narrative of pictures and words that document how this struggle has permeated all the creative, professional, and romantic dimensions of her life. A love story indeed, and deeply complex.
But it’s AI that haunts the structure of this engrossing graphic novel like a poltergeist. It’s important to note that Kurzweil does not approach AI as a propagandist but as a questioning and fully engaged participant in what is both a family story and a culture-wide story at the same time. So it’s no surprise that some of my concerns about AI and trans-humanist theory lingered after reading Kurzweil’s book. What did surprise me is the short dream I had two nights after reading “Artificial. I’ll share it here. The dream is very simple: “I'm looking at the folded out page of a graphic novel...featuring ‘Tarzan’. There's some mention about how Tarzan is now in California, and something else about "fitness", and his "immortal body".
That's it. A very short dream.
Two points immediately struck home. First, "Tarzan" is a highly civilized man, Lord Greystoke, who moves back down (sic) into a primal level of embodiedness, which is exactly the opposite direction of the idealized AI cyborg composite envisioned by trans-humanists. Second, the dream refers to Tarzan's "immortal body" – and immortality is also one of the goals projected by trans-humanists for an emergent AI personality. To me, the dream suggests that if we want to "transcend" into AI (abstract) persons, we have to simultaneously "descend" deeper than ever into our personal, biological bodies. This compensatory and enlivening synthesis would presumably “normalize” AI by keeping it within the human domain, so to speak, of embodiedness.
Bottom line: I finished “Artificial: a Love Story” feeling that Amy Kurzweil’s greatest gift to the reader is how brilliantly she uses the graphic novel format to picture and describe her deeply personal struggles with both the appeal and the ambiguities of the already-with-us AI revolution. It’s not a made-up story. It’s a story we’re all involved in, whether we like it or not.
Read it. Enjoy its artfulness. And catch up with the present.
The personal story begins to come into focus when the reader is told that Amy Kurzweil’s father, Ray Kurzweil, is one of the pioneering gurus not only of AI but also of the AI ideal of creating a “trans-human” AI personality, viz., a fully human personality independent of the body. Her achievement is her ability to illustrate, literally, the story of how she herself has struggled all her life to honor, understand, and philosophically discern her father’s AI legacy, which includes Ray’s attempts to use writings and recordings of his father’s (Amy’s grandfather) writings to create a “chat-box of the dead” -- an interactive AI personality created solely from Fred Kurzweil’s printed and recorded words. This thread of Kurzweil’s family story gives the reader a truly unnerving yet poignant glimpse into at least one facet of our looming “artificial” future. Kurzweil shows great vulnerability as she creates a narrative of pictures and words that document how this struggle has permeated all the creative, professional, and romantic dimensions of her life. A love story indeed, and deeply complex.
But it’s AI that haunts the structure of this engrossing graphic novel like a poltergeist. It’s important to note that Kurzweil does not approach AI as a propagandist but as a questioning and fully engaged participant in what is both a family story and a culture-wide story at the same time. So it’s no surprise that some of my concerns about AI and trans-humanist theory lingered after reading Kurzweil’s book. What did surprise me is the short dream I had two nights after reading “Artificial. I’ll share it here. The dream is very simple: “I'm looking at the folded out page of a graphic novel...featuring ‘Tarzan’. There's some mention about how Tarzan is now in California, and something else about "fitness", and his "immortal body".
That's it. A very short dream.
Two points immediately struck home. First, "Tarzan" is a highly civilized man, Lord Greystoke, who moves back down (sic) into a primal level of embodiedness, which is exactly the opposite direction of the idealized AI cyborg composite envisioned by trans-humanists. Second, the dream refers to Tarzan's "immortal body" – and immortality is also one of the goals projected by trans-humanists for an emergent AI personality. To me, the dream suggests that if we want to "transcend" into AI (abstract) persons, we have to simultaneously "descend" deeper than ever into our personal, biological bodies. This compensatory and enlivening synthesis would presumably “normalize” AI by keeping it within the human domain, so to speak, of embodiedness.
Bottom line: I finished “Artificial: a Love Story” feeling that Amy Kurzweil’s greatest gift to the reader is how brilliantly she uses the graphic novel format to picture and describe her deeply personal struggles with both the appeal and the ambiguities of the already-with-us AI revolution. It’s not a made-up story. It’s a story we’re all involved in, whether we like it or not.
Read it. Enjoy its artfulness. And catch up with the present.
January 18, 2024
I was reading Amy Kurzweil’s Artificial: A Love Story, and was contacted by the Disability Resource Center by my university asking me about my class texts; they wanted to see if they would be compatible with their Kurzweil technology to help a disabled student have more success in the class. Kurzweil, hmm. Then I recalled I had read about Amy’s father, Ray Kurzweil, in daughter Amy’s book.
It’s hard to know what this book is about, exactly. Creativity? The drive to create? Family, a generation of creative people, clearly. Amy is a pretty well known New Yorker cartoonist and this is her magnum opus, a Big Book, a memoir/biography of her tech/AI inventor Ray, her grandfather, musician Fred/Fritz--A FredBot--and herself, a cartoonist.
Through AI and almost indecipherable journal writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred’s voice, and he enlists his daughter, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s inheritance. Ray wants to live forever and he is actively pursuing this goal. Amy is helping him in various ways, including this book.
Amy worked some seven years researching her late grandfather, a gifted pianist and conductor, who died before she was born. Fritz Kurzweil and his wife fled Vienna to the United States after the Nazi invasion in 1938. The book doesn’t help you get to know Fritz very well--this would be the point of the chatbot version of him they are creating, I guess, but I doubt I would read? watch? It. I wasn’t that engaged with him or the project.
I think this is the size and scope and ambition of a graphic novel/memoir/biography that I and others would call a masterpiece, and it has everything but the kitchen sink in it, from family history, to the philosophy of identity to art/creativity to that vague subtitle about love (father love, primarily, though in general it feels more abstract than emotional).
The book is filled with favorite quotes, and great artwork, though I couldn’t help seeing the primary influence of another ambitious/obsessive cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, who also cataloged her family and her own life in various novels and comics. The initial image--a father on his back, feet up in the air, balancing his daughter on his feet--is a central image as well in Bechdel’s Fun Home.
It’s as rambling as most of my reviews, sort of OCD/ADHD, something it took her most of a decade (or more?) to complete. I was sort of overwhelmed by it; compared to Bechdel, who is also obsessive, it is less focused, it is like Amy combines the purposes of multiple books all in one book. As in: What ISN’T relevant to put in this book? It’s my magnum opus! I can’t say it sucks; I just wasn't as engaged with it as I wanted to be. I found myself putting it down a lot and doing something else, and it has been around this house for weeks. But it is worth taking a look at it for sure as I see many of you love it, god bless you. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it's that I found Kurzweil moderately interesting, but I am just not into AI.
It’s hard to know what this book is about, exactly. Creativity? The drive to create? Family, a generation of creative people, clearly. Amy is a pretty well known New Yorker cartoonist and this is her magnum opus, a Big Book, a memoir/biography of her tech/AI inventor Ray, her grandfather, musician Fred/Fritz--A FredBot--and herself, a cartoonist.
Through AI and almost indecipherable journal writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred’s voice, and he enlists his daughter, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, to help him ensure the immortality of their family’s inheritance. Ray wants to live forever and he is actively pursuing this goal. Amy is helping him in various ways, including this book.
Amy worked some seven years researching her late grandfather, a gifted pianist and conductor, who died before she was born. Fritz Kurzweil and his wife fled Vienna to the United States after the Nazi invasion in 1938. The book doesn’t help you get to know Fritz very well--this would be the point of the chatbot version of him they are creating, I guess, but I doubt I would read? watch? It. I wasn’t that engaged with him or the project.
I think this is the size and scope and ambition of a graphic novel/memoir/biography that I and others would call a masterpiece, and it has everything but the kitchen sink in it, from family history, to the philosophy of identity to art/creativity to that vague subtitle about love (father love, primarily, though in general it feels more abstract than emotional).
The book is filled with favorite quotes, and great artwork, though I couldn’t help seeing the primary influence of another ambitious/obsessive cartoonist, Alison Bechdel, who also cataloged her family and her own life in various novels and comics. The initial image--a father on his back, feet up in the air, balancing his daughter on his feet--is a central image as well in Bechdel’s Fun Home.
It’s as rambling as most of my reviews, sort of OCD/ADHD, something it took her most of a decade (or more?) to complete. I was sort of overwhelmed by it; compared to Bechdel, who is also obsessive, it is less focused, it is like Amy combines the purposes of multiple books all in one book. As in: What ISN’T relevant to put in this book? It’s my magnum opus! I can’t say it sucks; I just wasn't as engaged with it as I wanted to be. I found myself putting it down a lot and doing something else, and it has been around this house for weeks. But it is worth taking a look at it for sure as I see many of you love it, god bless you. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it's that I found Kurzweil moderately interesting, but I am just not into AI.
November 19, 2023
Amy Kurzweil documents the relationship between humans and their memories with the eclectic graphic novel Artificial: A Love Story. Amy’s father Ray is a brilliant inventor who has started dabbling in the world of artificial intelligence. His latest project is an attempt to blur the lines between life and death by creating a chat bot based on his deceased father Fredric. Part of the process requires Amy to dig through warehouse storage to find letters, musical compositions, and personal writings that will help the AI better communicate; her sessions with the coders are also used to gauge the developmental progress. Along the way, Amy attempts to reconcile her outlook on life with that of her family. The lengthy tome is visually engrossing, featuring Kurzweil’s artistic range across a number of subjects and ideas. The details vary from her traditional cartoon style to detailed figure studies to graphic text replication to drawn replications of multimedia. The constant flux is welcome instead of jarring, as it helps break down the headier concepts though pencil and paper exploration. Being a biographical creation, the book does bounce between topics like family and love to technology and legacy very quickly. Technical terms are tossed about with such aplomb that Kurzweil incorporates an index at the end of the project to aid in deciphering the lingo. Despite brief moments of familial binding, the story does become a dry recording of facts and conjecture at times. Artificial: A Love Story plugs readers into the world beyond their demise, but demonstrates that the code of living is still being deciphered today.
February 28, 2024
The author of this graphic memoir is a New Yorker cartoonist and the daughter of futurist/transhumanist/inventor Ray Kurzweil, famed for bringing to attention and prediction for the singularity, when machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence. The main subject of Amy's book is the project her father has embarked upon to upload all of his father's writing to form a chatbot, a Fredbot, to hold conversations with him. Ray's father, Frederic Kurzweil, was a composer and conductor who escaped Europe during World War II; wife Hannah an artist. There are also threads surrounding her relationship with her husband, both academic nomads as Frederic was in his later life. Ray is also a major subject of the book, as Amy recounts many conversations Amy has with her father about his parents, his life, and his theories. There's a lot of heady, and heavy, stuff here: memory and its preservation, technology, how and in what form we might live on for future generations; what constitutes a "soul" ; can technology bring immortality or just faded versions of what once was? Or is art a better form for that, as is the case with Frederic's music or Hannah's paintings? As Amy is trying to preserve history by uncovering Frederic's documents and the stories behind them, through methods like uncovering what each stamp on the passport might mean; Ray is using technology for the same purpose. But is Frederic's real legacy passed down through the traits that each member has inherited, or the stories they half remember, or the patterns that each generation seems to follow? A little meandering and overstuffed, but also thought-provoking, too.
February 10, 2024
Amy Kurzweil's grandfather, Fred, escaped from Nazi Austria just before it would have been too late. The family was educated, prominent, and Jewish. He was an musician and conductor, very talented. Her father, Ray, is a well-known computer scientist, author, futurist, and inventor of the Kurzweil synthesizer. He decides to create a digital simulation of his father, what Rudy Rucker would call a lifebox, and recruits Amy to help with the research and parameters. Kind-of-spoiler: I would not consider the results very good. I think there are already algorithms for better conversation; this one mostly replies to questions with actual quotes. Maybe they've upgraded it by now.
But the book is about much more than that. It's about the lives of Amy, Ray, and Fred and their significant others; their oddities (Ray has kept massive amounts of his father's notes and journals as well as keeping his own, and Amy has the same tendency to save everything); artificial intelligence; the phenomenon of consciousness; and the meaning of life.
I found a lot to like in this book. The questions it tackles are fascinating. The family is likeable, and the fondness among them is sweet, especially between Amy and Ray. That said, boy do they think a lot. There's a lot of what to me is overthinking, in a way that is maybe a definition of "intellectual" as a cultural style, and which I generally prefer to not do. Still, following the thought processes led me to some interesting ideas. Also, the Appendix expands on things noted in the text, and is worth at least skimming.
But the book is about much more than that. It's about the lives of Amy, Ray, and Fred and their significant others; their oddities (Ray has kept massive amounts of his father's notes and journals as well as keeping his own, and Amy has the same tendency to save everything); artificial intelligence; the phenomenon of consciousness; and the meaning of life.
I found a lot to like in this book. The questions it tackles are fascinating. The family is likeable, and the fondness among them is sweet, especially between Amy and Ray. That said, boy do they think a lot. There's a lot of what to me is overthinking, in a way that is maybe a definition of "intellectual" as a cultural style, and which I generally prefer to not do. Still, following the thought processes led me to some interesting ideas. Also, the Appendix expands on things noted in the text, and is worth at least skimming.
April 15, 2024
I thought this was going to be a thought-provoking, melancholy story on the nature of love and relationships (which is what it wanted to be), but instead I got a meandering, loosely-connected narrative of Amy helping her father with his various projects. I'll admit: I didn't read the summary super closely and thought this was a fiction rather than (yet another....) memoir, so that's on me.
The art is pretty good: photorealistic when it needs to be but serviceably and recognizably loose for the majority. It's a very "chatty" book, so there's lots of talking heads, but Kurzweil varies her page layouts and techniques to provide some variety.
Ray Kurzweil seems like a very interesting man with lots of interesting ideas, but we're not really exploring those here, since his role is just "dad." His father, who he and Amy spend however long (seriously - months? years? who knows) trying to get to know through his writings and artifacts, never materializes. And Amy just seems neurotic and listless, totally unwilling to leave New York because it's somehow part of her identity; she seems unhappy with the state of her relationship with her boyfriend throughout the book, but ends up marrying him in the end (with no discussion except for the one, however long ago, where they discuss that Amy doesn't want to get married- what changed??).
There are some interesting ideas and concepts and discussions, but it felt like living daily life right alongside Kurzweil, which is just not interesting to me.
The art is pretty good: photorealistic when it needs to be but serviceably and recognizably loose for the majority. It's a very "chatty" book, so there's lots of talking heads, but Kurzweil varies her page layouts and techniques to provide some variety.
Ray Kurzweil seems like a very interesting man with lots of interesting ideas, but we're not really exploring those here, since his role is just "dad." His father, who he and Amy spend however long (seriously - months? years? who knows) trying to get to know through his writings and artifacts, never materializes. And Amy just seems neurotic and listless, totally unwilling to leave New York because it's somehow part of her identity; she seems unhappy with the state of her relationship with her boyfriend throughout the book, but ends up marrying him in the end (with no discussion except for the one, however long ago, where they discuss that Amy doesn't want to get married- what changed??).
There are some interesting ideas and concepts and discussions, but it felt like living daily life right alongside Kurzweil, which is just not interesting to me.
November 21, 2023
A masterpiece, moving, funny, thought provoking. This endearing memoir consists of the words, illustrations and life of the author, Amy Kurzweil. She is a noted cartoonist (regularly in The New Yorker). She embarked on what would be a seven year quest to learn more about her late grandfather, a gifted pianist and conductor, who died before she was born. Fritz Kurzweil and his wife fled Vienna to the United States after the Nazi invasion in 1938. Fred's son, aka Amy's father, Ray Kurzweil, is a noted inventor who has done a great deal of work with Artificial Intelligence, inventing computer programs that could compose and record music, translate languages... and more recently in the chat gbt-type programming, which is all in the news these days. The quest for Amy, and her father, was ultimately to go through stored boxes of their grandfather/father's papers, including handwritten journals that had to be deciphered, feed them into a computer, and bring him back to life, so to speak. And they did. As "Fred-Bot". He's not really a robot. He's an image on a computer screen, whose words are based on his own writings. Quite interesting. The journey is quite amusing, and moving, and detailed. And that's really the most entertaining part. The book is a lovely read, and the richness of the illustrations is astounding. This author is so gifted! Highly recommended.
November 5, 2024
A library impulse borrow. On the one hand, it begins with a provocative question: what is the meaning of life? On the other hand, the book (and its characters) never makes an honest attempt to answer that question. It frankly does not seem interested in the question at all, as if to say - the meaning of life hardly matters if you can preserve life's facts in some way, even if in a thin and insubstantial way.
Instead, the tripartite narrative (Amy, her father Ray, and grandfather Fred) ignores the search for meaning in favor of the search for immortality via artifice. For all three individuals, I think the story points to the grasping drive to preserve ourselves and those we remember, somehow, some way, no matter how discomfiting (a chatbot fine-tuned on a dead man's artifacts can seem only ghoulish to me in all senses of the word - which is ironic because I now work and previously worked at an AI tech company).
This memoir is highly discursive and would dissatisfy anyone hoping for any kind of obvious conclusion/closure. But I think some aspects of it are interesting, especially in the age of near-AGI. It reminds me a bit of Lucy Knisley's early graphic memoirs - very young, very unsure, very vulnerable. If you like those works from Knisley, you'll probably like this.
Instead, the tripartite narrative (Amy, her father Ray, and grandfather Fred) ignores the search for meaning in favor of the search for immortality via artifice. For all three individuals, I think the story points to the grasping drive to preserve ourselves and those we remember, somehow, some way, no matter how discomfiting (a chatbot fine-tuned on a dead man's artifacts can seem only ghoulish to me in all senses of the word - which is ironic because I now work and previously worked at an AI tech company).
This memoir is highly discursive and would dissatisfy anyone hoping for any kind of obvious conclusion/closure. But I think some aspects of it are interesting, especially in the age of near-AGI. It reminds me a bit of Lucy Knisley's early graphic memoirs - very young, very unsure, very vulnerable. If you like those works from Knisley, you'll probably like this.
December 2, 2023
There’s a lot more to this book than you might expect. I read it twice — once to get a feel for the story, another time to engage with it. I generally find that with graphic novels, the second reading is much more impactful than the first.
The easy pitch is “The author and her dad trained an AI on her grandfather’s writing, here’s how that went”, but that’s way too simple.
Kurzweil (daughter of Ray, the Singularity guy) goes full memoir here, and the book is much better for it. She asks big questions about the nature of life, personality, art and the ownership of those things. She goes deep with the history of her grandfather and other figures, and the struggles she went through finding her footing with her husband, early in their relationship.
The art is fantastic, as you expect. You could write a term paper on the technique and style changes that happen throughout this book and how they interact with the story she’s telling. She suggests this line is from the chatbot:
...but I’m sure it’s hers alone, and it describes the book perfectly. I loved this and I’ll be reading it again.
The easy pitch is “The author and her dad trained an AI on her grandfather’s writing, here’s how that went”, but that’s way too simple.
Kurzweil (daughter of Ray, the Singularity guy) goes full memoir here, and the book is much better for it. She asks big questions about the nature of life, personality, art and the ownership of those things. She goes deep with the history of her grandfather and other figures, and the struggles she went through finding her footing with her husband, early in their relationship.
The art is fantastic, as you expect. You could write a term paper on the technique and style changes that happen throughout this book and how they interact with the story she’s telling. She suggests this line is from the chatbot:
A work of art begins by opening to us the inner life of its creator; it ends by revealing us to ourselves.
...but I’m sure it’s hers alone, and it describes the book perfectly. I loved this and I’ll be reading it again.
May 8, 2024
As much as I like stories about AI, this book didn’t really work for me. It’s one of those instances when you can recognize that something is objectively well done yet subjectively is doing nothing for you.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t care for memoirs, perhaps because it was too long and overwrought with detail and ponderous navel gazing. Not sure. But it is a rather interesting three-generational layer cake of a story about a variously talented family with the main motif being that of the author trying to understand her father who she thought she knew and her grandfather who she never did. This process and this book took years and plenty of investigative work, summoning journal entries, articles, etc. It helped that the father and grandfather were known public figures to an extent. With one of them being a rather important name in artificial technology. Et voila, the title
There is nothing artificial about this book. It’s authentically written and drawn. It’s meditative, thoughtful, intelligent, and will likely work wonders for many readers.
Perhaps it’s because I don’t care for memoirs, perhaps because it was too long and overwrought with detail and ponderous navel gazing. Not sure. But it is a rather interesting three-generational layer cake of a story about a variously talented family with the main motif being that of the author trying to understand her father who she thought she knew and her grandfather who she never did. This process and this book took years and plenty of investigative work, summoning journal entries, articles, etc. It helped that the father and grandfather were known public figures to an extent. With one of them being a rather important name in artificial technology. Et voila, the title
There is nothing artificial about this book. It’s authentically written and drawn. It’s meditative, thoughtful, intelligent, and will likely work wonders for many readers.
December 17, 2023
This book works better in theory than it does actually reading it. So full of ideas; partly a memoir, an obsessive cataloging of human behaviors and thoughts, a philosophical text on AI, and a love story. There's a unique perspective with the author's father as well, a very well-known figure in some circles, especially transhumanist ones, which adds a lot of depth to the AI bits. I don't think I've read anything quite like it but all of this sometimes leads to jarring transitions, like sometimes I'd flip the page to a wall of letters or journals written by her grandfather and groan a little. Like, do I go through all this? I'm a little OCD too, Amy! Don't do this to me! But sometimes I did, sometimes I didn't. You get the gist. It made me think a lot of things though, intellectualizing a lot of its feelings. A favorite hobby of mine, personally.
November 10, 2023
I’m already exhausted with many of the conversations around artificial intelligence but was intrigued by the premise of this graphic memoir. The author's dad is a renowned scientist and inventor who is embarking on a strange project to build an AI chatbot version of his own dad via found letters and journals. Why would anyone want or need such a thing?
That question informs this book’s thoughtful examination of love and grief, of needing to be seen and the fear of being forgotten.
AI in this book is about patterns, how our language style, mannerisms, behaviors, etc. can be reassuring in their own ways to the people in our lives. They can also be parsed out as raw data for a computer to catalog, analyze, and reassemble in order to approximate those patterns. The intent is to be indistinguishable from the real person, and the book explores the layered factors holding it back (for now, anyway). For all its promise, artificial intelligence in this context still requires authentic intelligence to interpret its output and an emotional willingness to validate it.
That emotional willingness ties together a deeper story about recurring patterns echoing throughout a family’s history and the author’s awareness of them as she contemplates her own major life decisions. The art and writing are warm and welcoming; every interaction between her and her dad in particular felt sweet and sincere. There are great moments where the author flexes her artistic range, whether with creative layouts incorporating documents, big pages to elevate emotional moments, or brief glimpses of vulnerability, depicting her own image in a more realistic style.
A smart and thought-provoking read.
That question informs this book’s thoughtful examination of love and grief, of needing to be seen and the fear of being forgotten.
AI in this book is about patterns, how our language style, mannerisms, behaviors, etc. can be reassuring in their own ways to the people in our lives. They can also be parsed out as raw data for a computer to catalog, analyze, and reassemble in order to approximate those patterns. The intent is to be indistinguishable from the real person, and the book explores the layered factors holding it back (for now, anyway). For all its promise, artificial intelligence in this context still requires authentic intelligence to interpret its output and an emotional willingness to validate it.
That emotional willingness ties together a deeper story about recurring patterns echoing throughout a family’s history and the author’s awareness of them as she contemplates her own major life decisions. The art and writing are warm and welcoming; every interaction between her and her dad in particular felt sweet and sincere. There are great moments where the author flexes her artistic range, whether with creative layouts incorporating documents, big pages to elevate emotional moments, or brief glimpses of vulnerability, depicting her own image in a more realistic style.
A smart and thought-provoking read.
April 14, 2024
There are really interesting parts of this book and it’s clearly a labor of love, but it started to feel tedious and repetitive in the last third of it. The story also just seemed scattered and without direction, and the inclusion of archives on pages was overwhelming at times. I think the ideas she was exploring and her family were fascinating so it kept me reading and overall I would say I enjoyed it. But it’s the kind of graphic I would only suggest to someone who already reads and enjoys a lot of graphic memoir. Her use of the comics format is unique and worth a look. But the style felt too frenetic and overwhelming to me. Discussed this for Graphic Novel Club and most seemed to have mixed feelings like myself. I actually think I liked it best of the group.
February 17, 2025
This may be a bit too cerebral for me.
The premise focuses on a project Amy and her father are working on together. Her father, Ray Kurzweil, has all sorts of memorabilia from his father. Amy is inputting all of the correspondence, news clippings and other interviews into a computer. She then asks a company to recreate her grandfather's voice as an AI that she can interview.
I went down a rabbit hole about Ray Kurzweil (I encourage you to do the same) and it seems he has a simple one title description of a job at Gooogle (not sure he is still employed there).
All in all, I liked the idea of preserving our loved ones in an effort to get at the heart of who they are, but Amy learns that perhaps we can never know someone through their answers alone.
This may have been more effective without the voice of Ray and the philosophical waxing between Amy and her boyfriend.
The premise focuses on a project Amy and her father are working on together. Her father, Ray Kurzweil, has all sorts of memorabilia from his father. Amy is inputting all of the correspondence, news clippings and other interviews into a computer. She then asks a company to recreate her grandfather's voice as an AI that she can interview.
I went down a rabbit hole about Ray Kurzweil (I encourage you to do the same) and it seems he has a simple one title description of a job at Gooogle (not sure he is still employed there).
All in all, I liked the idea of preserving our loved ones in an effort to get at the heart of who they are, but Amy learns that perhaps we can never know someone through their answers alone.
This may have been more effective without the voice of Ray and the philosophical waxing between Amy and her boyfriend.
March 1, 2025
Style is fairly disorganized - lots of panels with relatively stationary objects or minor repititions of things like instagram pages. Some ideas are interesting but dragged out. Kurzweil's relationship with father is eventually revealed as strained and his quest to revive him via AI seems largely unfulfilling. There's a subplot with Amy's romance with philosopher boyfriend who has insteresting idea of perduance - that certain parts of the self exist in certain parts of time. An interesting conception of family that is relatively functional despite dealing with consequences of holocaust - they escaped, had level of success but perhaps limited inner joy. Father lived boring life - had weird exchange with AI company about rights to his convos.
June 12, 2025
Artificial: A Love Story is a graphic memoir that has, at its center, the relationship between the author and her father, a pioneer in machine learning—along with her grandfather, a composer who died before the author was born. These relationships are considered through memory, artistic composition, artificial intelligence, and consciousness. These are hefty themes, but Kurzweil presents them in thought-provoking and accessible ways. Still, i could not read more than a chapter or two at a time, as I needed time to digest and process the ideas. Good stuff.
Favorite Quotation: “A person is ever changing, but surely something makes you the same person over time. My father says: a person is a series of patterns.”
Favorite Quotation: “A person is ever changing, but surely something makes you the same person over time. My father says: a person is a series of patterns.”
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