by Amy Kurzweil
Comic
Amy Kurzweil, Stochastic Gossips, 2025. Ink and watercolor on paper
Artist’s Statement
“Stochastic Gossips” is a cover of Norman Rockwell’s classic “The Gossips” and a reference to the “stochastic parrot,” a term, coined by artificial intelligence researcher Emily Bender, that digs at large language models like ChatGPT that parrot language without “understanding” its meaning. But we human gossips don’t engage with LLMs stochastically (i.e. probabilistically); we imbue them with character, voice, maybe even agency. In my cartoons, the robot is a visual metaphor for our projection of human-like qualities onto machines and AI. The figure of the robot in cartoons is funny because we both know and don’t know that robots are not humans. This both/and space is often where humor lies.
In Rockwell’s painting, in the second-to-last beat of the image, the character Norman Rockwell hears a rumor about himself. In the final beat, he points a finger angrily at the original gossip. Is Rockwell upset because something private was made public? Or because some false information spread through the anthropocene? The answer depends on your own relationship to gossip, on how much faith you have that human conversation preserves the truth, and what you think Rockwell might have to hide.
In “Stochastic Gossips,” a character representing the artist Amy Kurzweil confides in a robot; she gifts some human language to the vast AI dataset (something we do every time we use the internet). In the end, she receives this information back to her, refracted through AI. Is the information false? Is it revelatory? Is it cliché, or surprising, or useful? The answer depends on what you think about the value of AI-generated language, which—stochastic parrots aside—is built from human ideas, our stories and exchanges, our secrets and our gossip.
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of two graphic memoirs: Flying Couch and Artificial: A Love Story, which was named a Best Book of 2023 by NPR, The New Yorker, and Kirkus. She is the 2024 winner of the Overseas Press Club Cartoon Award and her comics have been nominated for Reubens and Ignatz awards. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Black Mountain Institute fellow, and a Yaddo and MacDowell fellow. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Believer, The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, the Los Angeles Times, Literary Hub, and many other places. You can support her work, and take a monthly class with her, on Patreon.