AI and memory

This paper is written at a tipping point in the development of generative AI and related technologies and services, which heralds a new battleground between humans and computers in the shaping of reality. Large language models (LLMs) scrape vast amounts of data from the so called 'publicly available' internet, enabling new ways for the past to be represented and reimagined at scale, for individuals and societies. Moreover, generative AI changes what memory is and what memory does, pushing it beyond the realm of individual, human influence, and control, yet at the same time offering new modes of expression, conversation, creativity, and ways of overcoming forgetting. I argue here for a 'third way of memory', to recognise how the entanglements between humans and machines both enable and endanger human agency in the making and the remixing of individual and collective memory. This includes the growth of AI agents, with increasing autonomy and infinite potential to make, remake, and repurpose individual and collective pasts, beyond human consent and control. This paper outlines two key developments of generative AI-driven services: firstly, they untether the human past from the present, producing a past that was never actually remembered in the first place, and, secondly, they usher in a new 'conversational' past through the dialogical construction of memory in the present. Ultimately, developments in generative AI are making it more difficult for us to recognise the human influence on, and pathways from, the past, and that human agency over remembering and forgetting is increasingly challenged.