Where might you speak with the dead? Dimensions in Testimony now appears in 11 other institutions on three continents. The Museum of Jewish Heritage in Manhattan offers Survivor Stories: An Interactive Dialogue, its own AI-mediated experience in which visitors can ask questions to 10 survivors who are projected on a life-size screen. An online version with video snippets is also available, inviting people around the world to ask questions via computer microphone or by typing into a chat interface. The Testimony 360 project by the Holocaust Educational Trust in the United Kingdom goes one step further: Students can strap on VR headsets and immersively explore memorial sites in concentration camps and Jewish ghettos. The Canadian nonprofit Liberation75’s Young Again Never Again uses AI to de-age five survivors in their video testimonies, approximating what they would have looked like during the Holocaust. Students might relate more to survivors their own age, the thinking goes, than to nonagenarians. I wonder what my teenage self would have in common with my teenage Oma.
And then there are the AI chatbots. In fall 2023, New Yorker cartoonist Amy Kurzweil published Artificial: A Love Story, a graphic memoir in which she and her father, famed futurist Ray Kurzweil, train a chatbot on the writings of Ray’s father, a Holocaust survivor, with the goal of “ensur[ing] the immortality of their family’s fraught inheritance.” The Anne Frank chatbots created by SchoolAI, a Utah-based education start-up, and yeschat.ai take this further: They presume to generate answers in the manner that Anne would have. One afternoon in June, I opened the SchoolAI’s chat interface on my laptop and consented to a disclaimer about its imperfect historicity (“I may not provide a perfect recreation,” the AI told me). “How did you feel in Auschwitz?” I typed, knowing full well that Anne had stopped writing in her diary before she arrived at the camp. I pressed “Enter,” dreading the response:
When I arrived at Auschwitz, I felt afraid and alone. It was hard to be separated from my father and to see so much suffering. Every day was uncertain, and I missed my family terribly. But even then, I tried to hold on to hope and memories of better times.
What makes you interested in this part of my story?
The future of Holocaust memory and education is here—and it’s powered by AI. But what if, instead of resisting the deaths of the last survivors, we allow ourselves to accept their mortality?