Second gentleman Douglas Emhoff visited the USC Shoah Foundation Wednesday to learn about its work in Holocaust education and Dimensions in Testimony program that features artificial intelligence interactive videos of Holocaust survivors.
The program enables people to ask questions that prompt real-time responses from recorded video interviews with Holocaust survivors and other witnesses to genocide.
Emhoff asked the AI bot of Holocaust survivor Pinchas Gutter a series of questions, including “How did you survive?” and for his message to students.
Emhoff then had a Zoom conversation with Gutter.
“I feel like I already know you!” Emhoff told Gutter when they began their conversation.
Gutter told Emhoff and Kori Street, the foundation’s interim executive director, his story, and thanked Emhoff and the Biden administration for their work combating hate and antisemitism.
“I really feel that you are able to make a difference, and you are making a difference,” Gutter told Emhoff, the first Jewish spouse of an American president or vice president.
The USC Shoah Foundation — The Institute for Visual History and Education seeks to develop empathy, understanding, and respect through testimony. It has more than 55,000 video testimonies preserved in the Visual History Archive, one of the largest digital collections of its kind in the world.
The interviews average a little over two hours each in length and were conducted in 65 countries and 43 languages. The vast majority of the testimonies contain a complete personal history of life before, during, and after the interviewee’s firsthand experience with genocide.
Director Steven Spielberg founded the institute in 1994 to videotape and preserve interviews with survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust.