Graphic Memoir: Artificial (A Love Story)

The cover of Amy Kurzweil's book Artificial: A Love Story.

Graphic Novelist/Cartoonist Amy Kurzweil explores the intersections of family, of story, of technology and of Generative Artificial Intelligence in her new graphic memoir — Artificial (A Love Story) — and it sure seems like a book for the age we are in right now.

Her father – Ray Kurzweil — is a well-known figure in the technological world, always seeming to be a few years or decades ahead of others in thinking of the possibilities of technology. He has long talked of his concept of the “Singularity” where computers and humans will be fully entangled in common life experiences. His work is far-reaching, and he is a writer, creator, thinker, teacher.

Amy Kurweil, known for her art as a cartoonist in The New Yorker and beyond, weaves the story in graphic format of her father’s attempts to use the writings of his own father — Amy’s grandfather, Fred Kurzweil, a musician and conductor — to create an early version of an AI Chatbot that will allow Ray and Amy to converse with Fred, long deceased.

This fascinating book explores Amy’s early interactions with the Chatbot created with the words of a grandfather she never knew, as she and her father wrestle with the large questions that emerge from such an experiment, such as where does a person’s life really end, how authentic are the words we leave behind to the person we are, what are the ethics of create an AI Chatbot out of someone’s textual trail, and much more.

Amy Kurzweil captures the confusion of these moments of introspection in this world of advancing technology and what it means to have the possibility of reconnecting or just connecting with family through time, through the use of Generative AI platforms seeded with their words but not their personalities.

Although her book just came out this year, the events that she captures take place over the last few years, way before the release of ChatGPT and Bard and others in the recent wave of Generative AI. This gives an interesting resonance to her story, though, for while the Chatbot of her grandfather — it never quite works as she imagines it might — is revolutionary in many ways and before its time, one can easily imagine some company somewhere is already pitching this as a way for family to “remember” a lost relative through an AI Chatbot App.

Right?

Peace (writing it down),
Kevin

Music: Melody Meets Motion

I’m working on a music compositional project of “small songs” and am about 14 songs in. These are pieces less than 2 minutes long. Yesterday, I finished this one, with a guitar focus.

Peace (with six strings or more),
Kevin

Saturday Morning: Poems and Music

Exceptional Sounds

A few things emerging from a creative Saturday morning … the poem above is from a one-word prompt (“exceptional”); the comic poem comes from Grant Snyder’s Comic Poetry Month daily prompts (“messy”); and the music track was something I tinkered with, liked and completed, and the title (“In An Otherwise Odd World”) was strange enough to generate an interesting image via Adobe Firefly.

Words in Motion comic poem

Peace (making it),
Kevin

Assorted Poems (A Remembering)

Mourn The Changing Season

Most of these poems are from my morning writing, either from one-word prompts off Mastodon or from Open Write or from Write Out or from the nothingness that is the mind at work.

Piano Keys

May Morning Poem

A Path Winds Through

Listening To The Woods

Garbled Poem

Peace (and thought),
Kevin

The Beatles Final Collaboration (Thanks To Machine Learning)

I remembering reading something about Paul McCartney saying there was one more Beatles song under production, now that the Age of Artificial Intelligence was here, and to be frank, I thought: oh no. Please don’t let it be John Lennon AI Voice singing in the mix. Please don’t let it be AI George Harrison guitar.

It isn’t.

Instead, as I learned when I watched this short documentary last night, it’s a song that Paul, Ringo and George tried to work on decades ago to honor Lennon, with permission of his family, but the rough tracks that Lennon had recorded for a song that he never finished were distorted with loud piano and soft voice.

They gave up in the early 1990s. But now that Machine Learning is here and film director Peter Jackson has the technical skills, Paul realized, the computer algorithms and power could isolate Lennon’s voice and separate it from the rough mix that Lennon had made, and once the voice was isolated, they could build a song around it.

Harrison passed away in the meantime, so along with Lennon’s voice, Harrison’s slide guitar leads were also added into the recording, with McCartney and Ringo Starr playing along, allowing the claim that this is the Last Beatles’ Song to be true, such as it goes.

The song gets released today (Nov2), I believe. The documentary is worth a look.

Peace (and Sound),
Kevin

Book Review: Diary Of A Wimpy Kid 18 (No Brainer)

Diary of a Wimpy Kid book

It must be that time of year — the time when the newest Diary of a Wimpy Kid book by Jeff Kinney rolls off the presses, and sure enough, for the 18th year (!), a new book has arrived from the series. This one is called No Brainer and it’s another predictably funny set of journal skits in the life of Greg Heffley, and this time, the entire focus is on Greg’s middle school and the education system, so you know I was quickly opening the pages.

Kinney takes aim at issues such as school funding problems, book banning in school libraries, the use of advertising on school property from local companies, and much more as the new (out of retirement) principal of Greg’s school — which just learned it had terrible standardized test scores — seeks to motivate, cajole and do whatever it takes to get the school off the state’s watch-list, before devolving into every aspect of a money-grab.

As usual, it’s all a mess of distractions and dead ends, but Kinney’s skills with his pen and his writing brings heart to the story, through Greg’s keen observations about the transformation of his school, which is in danger of being closed.

I read this one in a day, enjoyed it, and have passed it on to one of my students. When I told this sixth grader that I had been reading each book, every year, for 18 years (I used to read them aloud with each of my three boys when they were younger), the student gave me a look, as if trying to grapple with the longevity of the reading experience.

Then we both laughed, and he thanked me for lending him the book, and soon was completely immersed in it.

Peace (over time),
Kevin

Collection of Digital Poetry

A friend was asking me more about Digital Poetry, and so I gathered together a collection of some of the video and animated and text and art poems that have been gathering dust over at YouTube into a Digital Poetry Playlist.

I added 129 poems (most are very short), a number that surprised me.

It was quite a journey to return to some of these pieces — some I didn’t remember at all, and some were rich moments of a return to the composition and construction.

Peace (and Poems),
Kevin