Walter Isaacson has a new business partner for his biography company – his Tulane student AI expert | Innovation

When recent Tulane University graduate Ishaan Pomichter was taking a digital technology class taught by renowned biographer and writer Walter Isaacson last year, the young tech enthusiast decided to create a set of artificial intelligence tools that Isaacson could use in his own work.

This decision paid off in more ways than one.

Pomichter earned an A in the class. He also ended up starting a business with his teacher.

Last fall, Isaacson and Pomichter officially joined forces to launch Boswell & Co.a startup that publishes biographies and memoirs of what its founders call “high-impact individuals, families and organizations.” The problem is that the company is openly embracing the use of AI to improve the efficiency of its research and writing.

Boswell, named for pioneering 18th-century biographer James Boswell, markets its services to successful clients who can afford six-figure fees to tell their story. His first book, about Jim Barksdale, a Mississippi native and former CEO of Netscape, will be completed this year. A second biography, on New Orleans manufacturing magnate JM Lapeyre, is in preparation.

A third volume is under contract, and Isaacson said the company is generating more leads as it plans to hire staff and pursue possible publishing partnerships.

The 73 year old man biographer and writerwho has spent his career chronicling risky entrepreneurs, is co-founder of his first startup at a time when the publishing industry is grappling with questions about how AI should and should not be used to enhance the art and business of writing, unlocking creativity rather than replacing or stealing it.

Personally, he’s optimistic about the new tools — and he’s ready to defend his company’s adoption of the technology, even as he braces himself for inevitable criticism.

“People say AI will put people out of work, but it’s the opposite: It will create jobs for writers and history students who can produce biographies much more efficiently,” the author said in a recent interview at his Garden District home.

A transgenerational partnership

Isaacson, a New Orleans native, has a prestigious media background that includes positions as editor-in-chief of Time magazine, chairman and CEO of CNN and president and CEO of the Aspen Institute, a prestigious think tank.

In 2011, he wrote a biography of Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, which became a worldwide bestseller, leading to five successful sequels that demonstrated his ability to make reading complex subjects enjoyable.

When the Jobs book was published, Pomichter was 9 years old. Less than a decade later, as a high school student in the San Francisco Bay Area, he was interning at tech startups. As a college freshman, he started his first business.

That same entrepreneurial drive led Pomichter, now 22, to partner with Isaacson to launch Boswell, even as he worked full time for another Bay Area tech startup. Alongside them is Owen Kirsten, 22, a history and anthropology student at Tulane, who is the company’s go-to reporter and interviewer.

The business the three started has very low overhead – requiring no dedicated office space, inventory or special equipment – ​​and it is bolstered by Isaacson’s reputation and long list of contacts.

Unlike Isaacson’s own books, which are aimed at a mass audience, Boswell produces biographies and memoirs for hire for business founders and successful people who want to document their legacies. Some may be written exclusively for family and friends while others will be distributed more widely.

For a fee of approximately $200,000, the Boswell team will research, write, edit and publish a 50,000- to 75,000-word book chronicling its subject’s life. Isaacson said demand was strong.

“Everyone deserves to have their story told,” he said.

Building a book with modern tools

Isaacson said the new company’s creative process is not so different from that of James Boswell himself, who helped create the model for modern biography by conducting in-depth interviews, building archives and taking exhaustive notes. However, instead of quill pens and letterpress printing, Isaacson’s team uses modern tools more powerful than Boswell could have imagined.

To begin the Barksdale book, Isaacson and his team gathered information from family archives, business correspondence and reputable publications. Kirsten conducted more than a dozen interviews to learn more about moments in Barksdale’s life that were not well documented. Pomichter added this material to the archive and, with Isaacson’s guidance, referenced it when writing chapter drafts, using AI to assist. Everyone, including the client, spoke up as the work progressed.

One chapter looks at Barksdale’s time as fraternity president at Ole Miss during integration. Others have looked at different stages of his career and the reasons for his $100 million donation to Mississippi schools.

Pomichter declined to describe his exact writing process, but he said he doesn’t just feed interview transcripts and other materials into an AI tool and ask it to write.

“We have so many interviews and articles that AI allows us to find the information we need more quickly and connect ideas across thousands of files,” Pomichter said.

The final version of Barksdale’s book will be between 200 and 300 pages. Boswell & Co. will produce physical copies as well as an electronic version. Customers also receive an archive of all searches and a “chatbot avatar” that can answer questions about the hardware.

The books will not bear the author’s name, but they will have a foreword by Isaacson. And the customer will own everything, including the copyright to the finished product.

Isaacson said he will donate all of his profits to Tulane’s scholarship fund.

“A fine line to walk”

Newspapers, including The Times-Picayune | The Advocate allows reporters and editors to use AI as a research tool but not to generate content. The rules for publishing are less well defined, with advocates saying the technology improves efficiency and critics saying it threatens jobs, creates legal and ethical problems and replaces original voices with generic prose.

Nick Mueller, historian, author and one of the founders of the National WWII Museum, is curious to see how Isaacson, whom he considers “one of the great thought leaders of our time,” will meet the challenges.

“AI can help writers speed up the process and get something started,” Mueller said. “But it’s a difficult line to cross in using the tools ethically and authentically.”

Isaacson, aware of potential criticism of his company’s approach, says there is a right way and a wrong way to put the tools into practice.

“If you just use AI without real editors, writers and journalists, you’ll end up with a mess,” he said. “What sets us apart is these people and careful collection of material, so that digital tools don’t hallucinate.”

He said the company aims to merge technology and the humanities, “creating more jobs than we destroy and having a nice little business in New Orleans, especially for writers and history students.”

The Boswell team says the technology has its obvious limitations, including the inability to understand historical context or why certain moments or ideas are important. He is also incapable of establishing human connection.

“The key to any biography is understanding what motivates someone and what makes them creative,” Isaacson said. “Machines are not creative and have no motivations, so they don’t fully understand.”

“Boswell will”

So far, Isaacson hasn’t done much to promote Boswell beyond a few mentions on podcasts, but he said marketing efforts will increase.

Looking ahead, the partners hope to hire more staff, tapping into New Orleans’ talent pool, but for now they are focused on completing their first three projects and growing the company.

For Isaacson, it’s a way to address a long-standing need.

“A lot of people contact me and say they want help writing their memoirs,” he said. “I just put one and one together to say that if we have this AI architecture and we have a lot of students who are really good at reporting, I can now say that Boswell will do it.”

Editor’s note: This story has been edited to accurately describe Jim Barksdale’s time at Ole Miss.