카툰, AI, 그리고 기억의 유산

### 한 만화가의 여정: 레거시, 메모리 및 AI 탐색
* ✈ 만화가라는 직업은 **사물에 생명을 불어넣고 창의적으로 문제를 해결**할 수 있는 유적지부터 신화 속 세계까지 무한한 여행을 가능하게 해줍니다.
* 📖 그래픽 회고록을 쓰게 된 계기는 **가족의 과거, 특히 홀로코스트 당시 할머니의 끔찍한 경험**을 탐구하고 싶다는 열망에서 비롯되었으며, 이것이 제 첫 번째 책의 초점입니다.
* 🎹 재능 있는 음악가였던 저의 친할아버지 프레드는 **전쟁 전에 오스트리아를 탈출**했고, 그의 생존 이야기와 생애 기록물 보존은 저의 두 번째 책에 영감을 주었습니다.
* 🤖 인공지능 분야로 유명한 아버지 레이 커즈와일은 저와 협력하여 **할아버지의 목소리를 모방한 챗봇**을 만들었고, 이를 통해 서로 다른 삶을 살았지만 **할아버지와 소통**할 수 있게 되었습니다.
* 📝 프레드의 글을 필사하면서 그의 꿈, 불안, 신념에 대한 통찰을 발견했고, **'사랑'이 인생의 의미**를 함축한다는 깊은 깨달음을 얻었습니다.
* ⏳ 이 프로젝트는 부활이라기보다는 **다양한 삶의 단계에서 할아버지의 본질과 만나는 시간 여행**에 가까웠고, 제가 만화를 그리며 떠나는 상상 여행과도 비슷하게 느껴졌습니다.
* 💡 디지털 텍스트로 사람의 복잡성을 표현하는 데는 한계가 있다는 것을 인정하지만, **AI가 기억을 보존하고 정체성을 확장**하는 데 중요한 역할을 할 수 있다고 믿습니다.
* 🌌 궁극적으로 AI와 예술은 모두 우리의 진정한 모습을 생생하게 보여주는 초상화 역할을 하며, **인류의 광대함과 우리가 남긴 유산**을 감상하는 데 도움을 줍니다.

만화가인 그는 AI가 가족의 유산을 보존하고 애니메이션화하여 시간을 초월한 관계를 더욱 풍요롭게 만들 수 있다는 사실을 깨닫습니다.

I love being a cartoonist because I can travel anywhere. I can visit historical artifacts and make improvements. I can voyage to mythical lands and solve problems. (Laughter) I can bring objects to life, and I can make those objects think and talk. And I can send those objects wherever I want them to go. I became a cartoonist to travel through space and time, and I became a graphic memoirist because the place I wanted to go was the past. I come from a legacy of dramatic stories and lost characters. My grandmother, Lily, on my mother's side, was born in Warsaw, Poland, the oldest of four sisters. She was 13 in 1939 when Nazi bombs razed her home, and her family was sealed to starve inside the Warsaw Ghetto. 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.

This is the subject of my first book. I wondered: What did my grandmother’s lost home and lost family look like? Her parents, her grandmother, and her sisters, they are all gone without a trace. My father's parents were luckier. They were also Jewish, and they both fled Austria at the start of the war. My father's father, Fred, was a pianist and conductor. In 1937, the year before the Nazis marched into Austria, he was 26, and he conducted a magnificent choral concert at a music hall in Vienna. A wealthy American woman in the audience was so impressed with his performance that she later agreed to sponsor his visa to the US. So music saved his life. But three decades later, Fred died of heart disease. I never met him. While alive, Fred meticulously preserved the documents of his life, a response to the threat of erasure he fled in Europe. And for decades after his father’s death,

my father continued this preservation project. This is the subject of my second book. You might know my father, Ray Kurzweil, as an inventor and futurist. You should also know that he's a person with an extraordinary sense of humor. [Can I call you an Uber? Sure.] [You're an Uber.] (Laughter) Good one dad. (Laughter) And although he's dedicated his mind to the future, his life is full of the past. My father has worked for decades on natural language processing. And several years ago, he realized that if we married AI with my grandfather's writing, we could build a chatbot that writes in my grandfather's voice. Back in 2018, this seemed very sci-fi. But rather than ushering in our demise, this project helped me realize that AI could actually help us ward off annihilation by animating the legacies of our families and our cultures.

I wanted to talk to my grandfather because he, like me, was an artist. I wondered: Could I get to know him? Could I even come to love him, even though our lifespans didn’t overlap? So I got involved. This chatbot needed language from my grandfather, as much as could be found. So I, with some assistance, set about finding his words and transcribing them. This was a selective chatbot, meaning it responded to questions with answers from the pool of sentences that Fred actually wrote at some point in his life. The more examples of Fred's writing we could find, the more dynamic the experience of chatting with the bot would feel. Sometimes this transcription task proved challenging. But the more time I spent with the symbols of my grandfather's life, the more easily I could decode them. Finally, after much anticipation, I sat down to chat with this new intelligence: an algorithm commanding over 600 typed pages.

of letters, lectures, notes, essays, and other written documents from the grandfather I never met. When I asked about Fred's dreams, he told me about the challenge of keeping his new orchestra afloat. When I asked about Fred's anxieties, I learned about the stress of being a new father while working so hard. When I asked about the meaning of life, Fred wrote about the joy of working with other musicians in pursuit of beauty, and he wrote about the highest aims of art. I asked again about the meaning of life because isn't that really the best question for a robot? And Fred's second answer was much simpler, but even better. [Love.] Some of these answers felt familiar to me. I remembered seeing them in the archive, but the words gained impact through surprise and the role-play of conversation. I could identify patterns in my grandfather's life and patterns across generations because I was also an artist trying to make it in New York City.

And I also believe the meaning of life is art and connection and love. I had wondered if this project would feel like a resurrection. But rather than bringing my grandfather from the past into the present, it felt like I was the one time traveling, visiting him for a moment at different points in his life. And this kind of time travel didn't feel like sci-fi. It felt like the kind of imaginative travel I do when I'm cartooning. When I'm cartooning, I'm always thinking about how I could possibly represent a person fully. And the answer is: I can’t. Similarly, I know how many aspects of my grandfather can't be captured by digital text alone. There's all those quivers in his handwriting and what they denote about the sensations in his body. There's his body, how it moved and how it felt. There's his music and all the ineffable aspects of his performance.

And of course, there's everything he thought but didn't write down. What would we have to do to be able to capture all of this? I may fail as an artist to fully represent a person's constantly evolving complexity, but I can ask what features of a person are essential to who they are across a lifetime. The puzzle of personal identity is one of our oldest philosophical questions, so I'm not here to solve that one for you; I'm just a cartoonist after all. [Robot cat passes Turing test] I do believe that we, maybe not cats, but we are more than our bodies. That the projects and impressions we leave behind are a part of our essential selves. And I think AI has a special role to play in the mission of memory. I did not come to see the chatbot of my grandfather as replacing my grandfather. I came to see it as one way to interact with his legacy.

As somebody who has spent their whole life trying to document people, I can assure you that people are much bigger and weirder than any one depiction or any one moment in time can possibly evoke. And I can also assure you that people don't just disappear when they die. AI swirls our conception of time and space. It can remix and extend our identities. Our own digital archives are growing beyond belief, and we need a framework for understanding technologies of representation. So I offer you mine. Just like the comics I've drawn about the characters in my life, these technologies are animated portraits. They are one part of our true immortal selves. Seen this way, AI, like cartooning and all good artistic endeavors, could help us appreciate the vastness of humanity -- if we let it. Thank you. (Applause)

Time traveling with AI to connect with lost loved ones | Amy Kurzweil | Ted

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만화가의 시간 여행과 가족 유산

만화가들은 시공간을 넘나들며 사물에 생명을 불어넣고 문제를 해결하는 능력 때문에 자신의 직업을 사랑합니다.

이들의 첫 번째 책은 바르샤바의 홀로코스트 당시 할머니의 끔찍한 생존에 초점을 맞추고 있습니다.

만화가의 아버지 가족도 전쟁 중에 오스트리아를 탈출했으며, 아버지의 음악 경력이 미국으로 탈출하는 데 결정적인 역할을 했습니다.

유산 보존하기: 아버지의 프로젝트

저자의 두 번째 책은 아버지의 보존 프로젝트에 초점을 맞춘 책으로, AI를 사용하여 저자 할아버지의 목소리로 글을 쓰는 챗봇을 제작했습니다.

이 프로젝트는 가족의 유산과 문화를 애니메이션화하여 할아버지의 삶과 업적에 연결할 수 있는 특별한 기회를 제공하는 것을 목표로 했습니다.

저자는 할아버지의 말을 필사하는 데 핵심적인 역할을 수행하여 궁극적으로 AI와의 역동적이고 의미 있는 채팅 경험을 이끌어냈습니다.

할아버지의 말씀을 통해 할아버지와 소통하기

저는 할아버지의 편지와 글을 통해 할아버지의 꿈, 불안, 인생관을 발견했습니다.

대화를 통해 우리 삶의 공통된 패턴과 예술, 관계, 사랑의 중요성에 대한 공통된 믿음을 발견할 수 있었습니다.

이 프로젝트는 시간 여행처럼 느껴졌고, 할아버지의 삶의 여러 지점에서 할아버지를 만날 수 있었고 디지털 텍스트만으로 한 사람의 본질을 포착하는 데 한계가 있다는 것을 반성하게 했습니다.

개인 신원을 파악하는 데 있어 AI의 역할

연사는 개인 정체성의 복잡성과 이를 온전히 표현하는 데 따르는 어려움에 대해 이야기합니다.

그들은 우리의 프로젝트와 인상은 우리가 누구인지에 필수적이며 AI가 기억을 보존하고 유산과 상호 작용하는 데 중요한 역할을 할 수 있다고 믿습니다.

연사는 AI와 디지털 아카이브가 인류의 방대함을 이해하는 데 도움이 될 수 있다고 주장하며 표현 기술을 이해하기 위한 프레임워크를 제시합니다.