Time-Traveling Through Art and AI: Preserving Legacies and Exploring Identity

In this heartfelt talk, a cartoonist reflects on using art and AI to explore family legacies and the nature of personal identity. Sharing her family’s powerful history—her grandmother’s survival of the Holocaust and her grandfather’s escape from Nazi-occupied Austria—she reveals how AI helped her connect with her grandfather, a man she never met, through a chatbot created from his writings. While AI didn’t resurrect him, it allowed her to time travel through his thoughts and experiences. This exploration underscores the complexity of human identity and how technology, like art, can help preserve and extend our legacies.