A couple of years ago my wife decided to try and record her father’s life story. He had an interesting life, growing up in a working class family in England, going to Cambridge on a scholarship, lived in London in the ‘60s and early ‘70s, and went on to a storied career as a biochemist and mathematician in the US, before moving back to the UK, in rural Cambridgeshire, where he lives now. We were in Kings Lynn, where her father had grown up in a council estate. They walked around areas he’d known as a boy, and she hoped it would jog his memory, and lead to a flood of childhood recollections. He did remember many things, but she had difficulty shaping them into a coherent narrative, since his memories were often disparate, or solipsistic, as most people’s stories are, when they talk about their lives. She had a hard time separating fact from misplaced memories. After she told me about the experience, I realised that not only do most people not know how to tell stories but, perhaps more to the point, most people don’t know how to INTERVIEW.
That was the seed of Heirloom.
[Section: The demo, and the crowded market]
I originally built Heirloom as a simple demo, an experiment in using AI to create a narrative. A user could create an interview subject, run a session interviewing their subject, then build a narrative with the results. As a placeholder, I had Claude.ai generate three interviews with three (fictitious) people from different backgrounds and countries. The AI did a decent job of generating a narrative.
But after I finished the demo I did some basic market research and discovered at least a half-dozen other apps: StoryWorth, which had been around since 2014, ALifeUntold, and newer apps like Remento. I had to find a way to make Heirloom unique if it was going to gain any traction.
The existing apps fell roughly into three camps:
- Some (StoryTerrace, LiveBook Memories, No Story Lost) provide actual human beings, writers or journalists, to conduct the interviews and ghost-write the narrative. This is the gold standard, and nothing can replace a professional writer in constructing a good story. But these services don’t come cheap.
- Most of the others provided a library of dozens, even hundreds of, prompts for users to try, using trial and error to generate the optimal story. Some sent out one question a week, with the elder writing out an answer, others offered a variety of choices.
The “hundreds of expert-crafted prompts” feature DOES offer choice, but a static choice. A prompt list can’t adjust mid-conversation. The pre-existing prompt structure, even when there are hundreds of them, will tend to return generic responses.
I wondered if there was an opening here: using LLMs not just to generate a narrative out of repeated Q and A, but to help the interviewer, the adult child of the parent being interviewed, with the interview process itself. An iterative interview process to shape and refine the narrative until the optimal story was produced.
I used to work in documentary TV, and a lot of what I did was conducting interviews. Mostly pre-interviews, though I did interviews on camera from time to time. I never developed a methodology: I acted intuitively. I would learn a bit about whatever subject I was researching, and winged it with the person I was interviewing. I learned when to ask questions, what to ask questions on, what to focus in on. Maybe it came from always being curious about people, who knows.
For example, I worked on a TV series about golf course technology. I knew nothing about golf, had never played golf, and found the sport fantastically boring whenever I saw it on TV. I thought it would be a painfully uninteresting assignment. I was wrong.
Over the course of a couple of weeks, I interviewed golf course architects, golf course landscapers and, most fascinating of all, a so-called “bulldozer artist”. With the architects, I started by asking what features they looked for when they designed a golf course. They talked about their courses almost as works of art: how they’d include different species of trees, shrubs and flowers to complement the natural landscape; how they’d take into account the creation of micro-climates, where to put rivers, lakes and marshes, and how those features would affect play. The landscapers talked about how they’d fill out the architect’s vision, what they could and couldn’t do, and how they chose their bulldozer artists.
The bulldozer artist was exactly that, an artist. He described how, when he was driving through a landscape, he’d get out of his car, walk up a hill, and lie down to get the feel of it. How he’d study rivers, valleys, stands of forest, imagining how he could recreate them.
I conducted a dozen or so interviews like these, often on subjects I knew little about when I started. As a general principle, I found people would always open up if 1) you were genuinely interested in what they did, and 2) you could ask intelligent questions, and learn as you went.
Obviously, interviewing a parent is not like interviewing a potential subject for a documentary. The concerns are different. Genuine interest, is already there: a child is going to be interested in their parent’s story. The second is the hard part: knowing when an answer is routine and when it’s gold, and knowing which thread to follow. Nobody would have read about “golf courses are challenging.” Everybody remembers the man lying on the hill. Asking the write questions to draw out he subject’s stories, then using the answers to shape the narrative is key.
I saw it as an iterative process, but I couldn’t figure out how to pull it off, or how to do it in a way that wouldn’t be too intrusive or too wearying for an older person, or place too much emphasis on technology that might be alienating or even incomprehensible.
If we could encode even a rough version of the skill of interviewing (understanding when a subject is open or guarded, following an unexpected thread when something of interest appears, knowing when to listen and when to ask), I felt we could enhance the interview process and return a more interesting, and thus more human, narrative.
My goal is that by integrating AI into the interview process, Heirloom can come closer to human interviewers at a much reduced price, and can, hopefully, teach people how to interview and appreciate what goes into the art of the interview.
Now the question becomes: CAN AI actually do this?
In the next post, I’ll look at what AI can and can’t do here.
