Two brothers losing their sight built a clothing charity, and now run it with ChatGPT

Most nights in New York, Bryan Manning’s three children are read a story about Eddie the dinosaur detective, who goes off on an adventure and solves something with the help of his little sister Marlo and his baby sister Holland. Marlo and Holland are two of Manning’s own children, so they are in it every night, and when it finishes the family talk about what Eddie got up to.

Manning gets the story from ChatGPT, asking it for a fresh one each evening, and the reason he does it that way is that he cannot see the print in a picture book. For years before that he simply invented the stories himself, holding the book open and turning the pages at about the right moments, which worked well enough until his eldest learned his letters and pointed out that the page did not say any of that.

Manning and his older brother Bradford both have Stargardt disease, an inherited form of macular degeneration that takes away the middle of your vision, and there is no cure for it. Bradford was five when he failed the eye chart at kindergarten, and it took a long run of doctors and wrong answers before anyone gave it a name. Bryan, who is five years younger, got the same diagnosis from the same doctor a few years later.

School, and then work

They sat in the front row of every class and held their textbooks about two inches from their faces, and by the time they were ten even that had stopped helping. They could not reliably tell who was walking towards them. Both of them went to the University of Virginia anyway, and both moved to New York afterwards, Bradford into an investment firm and Bryan into selling software.

There were plenty of ordinary jobs neither could have taken. Bryan has said he could never have worked a supermarket till, because he could not read a barcode number well enough to type it in, and that when he tried banking he was simply slower than everyone else, because getting through a spreadsheet meant working across it one cell at a time.

A shirt in Bloomingdale’s

The company began in 2015 with Bradford telling his brother he was the worst-dressed man in New York, and the two of them going shopping in Bloomingdale’s, where they lost each other almost immediately, as tends to happen when neither of you can see. They found each other again at the door, both holding the same shirt, which they had each picked because of how soft it felt.

Around the same time they had been following the story of a young man with a different eye condition who was given a gene therapy and went from blind to sighted on a single injection, from braille back to print. The treatment was no use to them, but it showed that money reaching the right researcher could produce something they had spent their whole lives being told was coming eventually.

They started Two Blind Brothers in 2016, making deliberately very soft clothes and giving all the profits to retinal research. By late 2020 that came to more than $700,000, according to the Associated Press, a good deal of it from mystery boxes priced between $30 and $200 in which the buyer does not get to see what they are getting. People filmed themselves opening them, some of them blindfolded. Ice-T and Richard Branson lent their names to it, and Ellen DeGeneres sent a cheque for $30,000. The brothers now put the total given away at several million dollars, and the business has since become a registered charity.

What they say has changed

In a conversation OpenAI recorded and published this month, the brothers described what ChatGPT has done to a working day now that it can read things aloud to them. It goes through their email, summarises spreadsheets, reads memos they have been sent and drafts the ones they owe, checks whether a document is laid out properly, and helped them build the website. Bryan called it the greatest accessibility tool ever invented and Bradford called it the most consequential in history. That is their own view, given to the company that makes it, with one of its editors asking the questions.

The bedtime story needs no such caveat, because it is a man describing his own evenings. Manning has said he had assumed for a while that reading to his children was one of the things they were going to have to do without.

Bradford still tells the story of the day the diagnosis came through, when he was seven and sitting in the car outside the hospital while his mother stared at the steering wheel, swore once, and said they were going to Friendly’s for ice cream. They had a sundae, then went to Blockbuster and rented Air Bud, and he spent the afternoon watching a dog shoot three-pointers.