Art, creativity and the age of AI

Amy Kurzweil, American cartoonist and author of the graphic memoir, “Artificial: A Love Story,”  took the stage at ASU’s Agentic AI and the Student Experience summit with a hand-drawn deck and a disclaimer. “I’m a cartoonist, a proudly analog one,” said Kurzweil, whose presentation explored what stays human in the age of AI.

Her answer is captured in her graphic memoir written about a deeply personal project. In 2018, her father, the inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, enlisted her to digitize the writings of her grandfather Fred, a Viennese musician who fled the Nazis and died before she was born. They built a chatbot that answered questions with passages from his archive. “Handling the dataset made clear that the material behind any AI comes from human bodies and human lives, and that choosing what goes in is a creative, even artistic, act,” she said. 

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She argued that AI interactions should be viewed as literary fictions, requiring literary analysis such as close reading, character study and framing rather than blind trust. A question fiction always raises is, “Who is the author?’ “AI voices are an unprecedented work of collective authorship, and working out how an economy should honor all that human creativity is one of the great imaginative challenges ahead,” she said.

She explored the metaphors people have used to understand AI over time. Mathematician and logician Alan Turing’s imitation game made human language the yardstick for machine intelligence. But large language models have now passed that test, which shows language was never the whole measure, she said. American philosopher Shannon Vallor calls AI a mirror, reflecting our data and our past back at us. American sociologist Sherry Turkle, writing in the 1980s, saw machines as mirrors too, ones that make our own minds look strange and open to examination. American linguist Emily Bender’s “stochastic parrot” strips away the illusion of understanding, while tech leaders from Sam Altman to Dario Amodei have reached for “alien intelligence.” Kurzweil pressed on what that means. Aliens could be mushroom networks, ant colonies or the hostile invaders of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. 

Kurzweil said each metaphor reveals the speaker’s own fears, interests and desires. As she looked at the attendees in the room, she said that how they conceive of the technology will ultimately steer what it becomes.