Walter Isaacson‘s new company, Boswell & Co., which uses artificial intelligence as a tool to write commissioned biographies, is disappointing for those who care about biography as an art form rather than as an encyclopedia. 

Isaacson pointed to growing demand from people who want their life stories preserved. But not every record of a life is a biography. The company’s heavy emphasis on corporate clients and scalable services only reinforces that distinction.

One cannot simply buy a true biography. 

Traditionally, biography signals that the subject’s life possesses unusual interest, contradiction or historical significance worthy of examination. It is an attempt to understand a person in full: their achievements and failures, vanities and wounds, and to work out those contradictions on the page in a way that is compelling and humane. 

At its best, biography is not simply a scroll of facts about a life to unravel. It interprets the meaning of a life and wrestles with the ambiguity of the subject’s humanity to ask what that life has meant to our world.

This is what makes Isaacson’s involvement especially disappointing. Isaacson is one of America’s most prominent biographers and has chosen subjects known for their singular impact on our society. 

His books are praised for their patience, inquiry and lack of judgment. For someone so associated with the genre to recast it as a commodity suggests a diminished understanding of what makes it valuable in the first place. 

Efficiency may suit business, but it is rarely the measure of art.

The company’s pricing also makes Isaacson’s democratic rhetoric difficult to sustain. At a starting fee of $200,000, Boswell & Co. is not in the business of telling everyone’s story. It is in the business of telling the stories of those who can afford it. 

While it is not uncommon for a prominent figure to commission a biography, there are ethical implications of doing so. There are authorized biographies that are fair-minded, but many are simply vanity projects dressed in literary clothing.

Isaacson’s decision to evoke James Boswell makes this contrast even sharper. Boswell is remembered not for efficient information management, but for his presence, curiosity and patient observation of character. 

Boswell’s “The Life of Samuel Johnson” emerged from years of conversation, research and the unpredictable friction of real human encounter. That legacy sits uneasily beside AI-assisted production. Renowned biographers like Robert Caro and Blake Bailey are so respected because they spend years reckoning with the contradictions of their subjects.

In his memoir “The Shadow in the Garden,” the late James Atlas, describing how Richard Ellmann’s biography of James Joyce inspired his own career, writes that “it managed to avoid the tedious march of facts and data” by seeking instead to bring us closer to the man. 

Boswell & Co. does nothing to elevate biography as an art. To borrow Boswell’s name while treating biography as an assembly line strips away the humanity that makes it worth writing and reading in the first place.