Animating a memory with A.I. is a lie. (like the hesitant look in the lady with the child being turned into a smile) It's creating a false memory. Great way to surrender ones life to the new Master (A.I.) and weaken ones own emotional core.
I totally get your concern about AI potentially distorting memories—especially when apps animate old photos of loved ones. A flawed interpolation could easily imprint an expression or posture that never existed, and yeah, once you see it, that version might stick in your mind more than the original. It’s like a false memory wrapped in nostalgia tech.
That said, I think we’re heading into a very different kind of terrain—where memories aren’t just reconstructed from fragments like photos or home videos, but where AI can synthesize something much more complete. Think of all the digital traces we leave behind: texts, emails, voice recordings, video clips, journals. Layered together, they can form the foundation of a fairly realistic facsimile—something that can evolve over time and even be tuned to reflect different periods or dynamics in your relationship.
It’s not about reanimating someone with eerie accuracy, but maybe about creating something useful. Something therapeutic. Imagine a bot that understands both your loved one and your relationship with them—your regrets, your questions, the gaps you never got to close. Suddenly you might get a second chance at a conversation you never had, shaped by everything that person ever wrote, recorded, or shared—and everything you bring to it.
Of course, before all that gets serious, you’d probably give your grandparents Mohawks or make your dad do a TikTok dance. That’s just part of the play phase before the tech matures into something deeper.
It reminds me of journalism, oddly enough—where the moment you try to be completely objective, you reveal your subjectivity through your choices. In that way, your personal AI, trained on you and your memories, won’t be neutral. But maybe that’s the point. It will know you, and it will adapt its tone, delivery, even its philosophy based on how you think and feel.
Now take it a step further. What happens when enough people start opting in—volunteering DNA, metadata, life histories—and AI begins suggesting optimal paths for their lives? Education, love, health, meaning. At some point, it won’t just be about remembering the past; it’ll be about refining the future.
We’ll have to decide how much we want to outsource, how much of ourselves we want reflected back to us—and how much room we leave for surprise, imperfection, and growth. But I think it’s coming, whether we’re ready or not.
Let me pose a question: what is the purpose of memory? If it is accurate recall of the past, it often fails in individual instances (as you point out). Overall it does shape our sense of self (recall the Madhaymika Buddhist doctrine of “dependent arising” which states something similar), which you also point out. But is that why memory exists? We can try to answer this in a number of ways, evolutionarily, theologically, a la some philosophy, etc. But alarm over memory-pollution has a personal aspect that might differ from human to human. I won’t attempt to answer my own question here … however, unless it can be answered I don’t feel comfortable pressing the alarm button right now… but I could be wrong …
Philip K Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” explores some of these aspects of memory vs reality … the movie “Total Recall” was based on it. The story was published in 1966! Dick was very much ahead of his time …
I also realize that I think of memory as a sort of life vest I get to hold onto when I need it. If I were to look down and realize it’s not a life vest at all, but in fact a sport coat, I might fundamentally think differently about its usefulness!
I think my worry is that if I am aware that I have deliberately altered my perception of what was, the knowledge that what I now remember can’t be trusted (which, granted, maybe it can’t be anyway) removes a lot of its value for me. I like that what I remember about someone is “true,” or at least I believe it to be. But if I knew that it wasn’t, in essential ways, then doesn’t that change the value of the memory, regardless of the usefulness of that memory?
I realize in describing this how much I think of memories very similar to how I think of photographs—which is to say maybe not objectively true, but the next best thing and better than any other option we’ve got.
Regardless… Thank you for the thoughtful comment and spurring my own thinking on the matter.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
Memory is not a tape recorder, a video machine, or a beautifully rendered still. As you come upon a thought or idea, if you need an image you have to recreate it in your brain. The recreation is not the original but one crafted from information that you have the from the experience. That is shaped and colored by the feelings you had at the time. Some suggest that it is actually the feelings that lead to the event memory. What you have then is an associated likeness of the past event. Each time you do this it changes somewhat but it seems that the feeling is sustained.
As to the authenticity of the memory... We like to believe that we can rely on facts in some textual sense. Keep in mind though that we, as a species, have had feelings, and access to them far longer than text or even the spoken word.
Our species emerged as Homo sapiens only 200,000-300,000 years ago. Spoken language seems to have its origins only 100,000-135,000 years. So for about 120,000-130,000 years we had only instincts and feelings, developed over many hundreds of thousands of years for survival and later, thought and reason. It is our instincts and feelings that are our foundation. They are the basis for association.
An external image is a pathway to a feeling. AI, using the image as a starting point, does its' work. Since AI has already hooked into that feeling from the original image, the verisimilitude of the resulting imaging need only be "close enough". It has that built-in resonance, that feeling, that brings it home. We might thing of the new imaging the way we think of remembering events over time. We can consider the AI recreations associated to emotion.
And so, the value of the image? What really matters is not how painstakingly accurate the memory is, but its purpose. It is one thing to use memory to create detailed drawings, or testimony in court or in an argument with your SO, where shared experience becomes the fulcrum of an issue. If it is to recall the feeling as a keepsake, that is quite another thing altogether.
Well, but if I understand you correctly, this is in the moment of the viewing of the thing. Which I agree, need only bring back the right feeling to be valuable.
But if the consequence of doing so means I alter some fact-based understanding of someone or something that was important, is the juice worth the squeeze? I’m not so sure.
Whether your memory of the event that the image portrays is altered or not is up to you. That your own memory alters itself each time it is played out in your head is another thing but we accept that as a norm. The change is "of us" and our own personal process. AI is not.
Where we get into trouble is when we accept the AI version as fact as opposed to entertainment. I am reminded of the 1982 National Geographic Cover of the Pyramids in which Gordon Graham's image of the pyramids, with camels and their riders in silhouette, was altered ostensibly to fit the cover. Photographs as records of truth officially died right there.
That said, we might remember seeing that in real time ourselves and in our memory, moved the camels and riders without knowing it. That, however, would be "of us" and accepted without question or even realized.
Our dimensions are much stranger than we want to believe. There is no such thing as numbers nor is their science outside of human contrivance. How we see, what we take in as light, how it is processed and affected through the chemical mechanics, instincts, emotions, and memory from our eyes to our brain and back again, is really an evolutionary adaptation for survival yet in progress. It is hardly absolute in itself as it morphs into its next iteration.
We understand photographic principles, so capturing light and constructing a subsequent image based upon all of our seeing and camera limitations, is our charge.
In its' early years photographs were considered factual representations for their ability to record a perspective from one part of the world to another. It was a matter of the conveyance of experience to people who would otherwise not have access to it. It was considered a faithful rendition, even a truth. It was one thing to see a heroic view in the painting of The Charge of the Light Brigade, the Battle of Balaclava, by Charlton, and quite another to view the devastation of Matthew Brady's body strewn battlefields in our civil War. It changed how we, as a species, how we thought of war.
The chaos that is our universe is apprehended by processes which attempt to embrace it, even with imperfect methods, to arrest it in time. Very few of us ever transcend that. Much of our experience is a reverberation of vision as it is apprehended by a mind that receives it in the context of its experience. The dissonance we experience when what comes before us is not what we expect describes that process. For most of us, the 2-dimensional representation of chaos is as much truth as our modest day-to-day intellect can handle.
Churchill spoke about how it failed but I'm not sure where. It could have been the spirit of an image or a lack of detail for his purposes; the dissonance. He just wanted Karsh to give him cigar back. And so he rejected photography as a truth, albeit better than others. Everyman, however, doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Animating a memory with A.I. is a lie. (like the hesitant look in the lady with the child being turned into a smile) It's creating a false memory. Great way to surrender ones life to the new Master (A.I.) and weaken ones own emotional core.
Made harder by the pull of desperately wanting to see someone “alive” again.
I totally get your concern about AI potentially distorting memories—especially when apps animate old photos of loved ones. A flawed interpolation could easily imprint an expression or posture that never existed, and yeah, once you see it, that version might stick in your mind more than the original. It’s like a false memory wrapped in nostalgia tech.
That said, I think we’re heading into a very different kind of terrain—where memories aren’t just reconstructed from fragments like photos or home videos, but where AI can synthesize something much more complete. Think of all the digital traces we leave behind: texts, emails, voice recordings, video clips, journals. Layered together, they can form the foundation of a fairly realistic facsimile—something that can evolve over time and even be tuned to reflect different periods or dynamics in your relationship.
It’s not about reanimating someone with eerie accuracy, but maybe about creating something useful. Something therapeutic. Imagine a bot that understands both your loved one and your relationship with them—your regrets, your questions, the gaps you never got to close. Suddenly you might get a second chance at a conversation you never had, shaped by everything that person ever wrote, recorded, or shared—and everything you bring to it.
Of course, before all that gets serious, you’d probably give your grandparents Mohawks or make your dad do a TikTok dance. That’s just part of the play phase before the tech matures into something deeper.
It reminds me of journalism, oddly enough—where the moment you try to be completely objective, you reveal your subjectivity through your choices. In that way, your personal AI, trained on you and your memories, won’t be neutral. But maybe that’s the point. It will know you, and it will adapt its tone, delivery, even its philosophy based on how you think and feel.
Now take it a step further. What happens when enough people start opting in—volunteering DNA, metadata, life histories—and AI begins suggesting optimal paths for their lives? Education, love, health, meaning. At some point, it won’t just be about remembering the past; it’ll be about refining the future.
We’ll have to decide how much we want to outsource, how much of ourselves we want reflected back to us—and how much room we leave for surprise, imperfection, and growth. But I think it’s coming, whether we’re ready or not.
Very interesting! Lots to consider here. Thank you for sharing!
Let me pose a question: what is the purpose of memory? If it is accurate recall of the past, it often fails in individual instances (as you point out). Overall it does shape our sense of self (recall the Madhaymika Buddhist doctrine of “dependent arising” which states something similar), which you also point out. But is that why memory exists? We can try to answer this in a number of ways, evolutionarily, theologically, a la some philosophy, etc. But alarm over memory-pollution has a personal aspect that might differ from human to human. I won’t attempt to answer my own question here … however, unless it can be answered I don’t feel comfortable pressing the alarm button right now… but I could be wrong …
I used to teach a class called “Non-mimetic Art and Narrative” and that story was one I assigned …
I haven’t read the PKD but have seen total recall, and that’s a darn good stand in for what I’m worried about.
Philip K Dick’s short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” explores some of these aspects of memory vs reality … the movie “Total Recall” was based on it. The story was published in 1966! Dick was very much ahead of his time …
I also realize that I think of memory as a sort of life vest I get to hold onto when I need it. If I were to look down and realize it’s not a life vest at all, but in fact a sport coat, I might fundamentally think differently about its usefulness!
I think my worry is that if I am aware that I have deliberately altered my perception of what was, the knowledge that what I now remember can’t be trusted (which, granted, maybe it can’t be anyway) removes a lot of its value for me. I like that what I remember about someone is “true,” or at least I believe it to be. But if I knew that it wasn’t, in essential ways, then doesn’t that change the value of the memory, regardless of the usefulness of that memory?
I realize in describing this how much I think of memories very similar to how I think of photographs—which is to say maybe not objectively true, but the next best thing and better than any other option we’ve got.
Regardless… Thank you for the thoughtful comment and spurring my own thinking on the matter.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Maya Angelou
Memory is not a tape recorder, a video machine, or a beautifully rendered still. As you come upon a thought or idea, if you need an image you have to recreate it in your brain. The recreation is not the original but one crafted from information that you have the from the experience. That is shaped and colored by the feelings you had at the time. Some suggest that it is actually the feelings that lead to the event memory. What you have then is an associated likeness of the past event. Each time you do this it changes somewhat but it seems that the feeling is sustained.
As to the authenticity of the memory... We like to believe that we can rely on facts in some textual sense. Keep in mind though that we, as a species, have had feelings, and access to them far longer than text or even the spoken word.
Our species emerged as Homo sapiens only 200,000-300,000 years ago. Spoken language seems to have its origins only 100,000-135,000 years. So for about 120,000-130,000 years we had only instincts and feelings, developed over many hundreds of thousands of years for survival and later, thought and reason. It is our instincts and feelings that are our foundation. They are the basis for association.
An external image is a pathway to a feeling. AI, using the image as a starting point, does its' work. Since AI has already hooked into that feeling from the original image, the verisimilitude of the resulting imaging need only be "close enough". It has that built-in resonance, that feeling, that brings it home. We might thing of the new imaging the way we think of remembering events over time. We can consider the AI recreations associated to emotion.
And so, the value of the image? What really matters is not how painstakingly accurate the memory is, but its purpose. It is one thing to use memory to create detailed drawings, or testimony in court or in an argument with your SO, where shared experience becomes the fulcrum of an issue. If it is to recall the feeling as a keepsake, that is quite another thing altogether.
Well, but if I understand you correctly, this is in the moment of the viewing of the thing. Which I agree, need only bring back the right feeling to be valuable.
But if the consequence of doing so means I alter some fact-based understanding of someone or something that was important, is the juice worth the squeeze? I’m not so sure.
Whether your memory of the event that the image portrays is altered or not is up to you. That your own memory alters itself each time it is played out in your head is another thing but we accept that as a norm. The change is "of us" and our own personal process. AI is not.
Where we get into trouble is when we accept the AI version as fact as opposed to entertainment. I am reminded of the 1982 National Geographic Cover of the Pyramids in which Gordon Graham's image of the pyramids, with camels and their riders in silhouette, was altered ostensibly to fit the cover. Photographs as records of truth officially died right there.
That said, we might remember seeing that in real time ourselves and in our memory, moved the camels and riders without knowing it. That, however, would be "of us" and accepted without question or even realized.
We are in the same place with AI 42 years later.
The only thing I quibble with is photographs as truth. To paraphrase Churchill… Photography is the worst medium for “truth” except for all the others.
Our dimensions are much stranger than we want to believe. There is no such thing as numbers nor is their science outside of human contrivance. How we see, what we take in as light, how it is processed and affected through the chemical mechanics, instincts, emotions, and memory from our eyes to our brain and back again, is really an evolutionary adaptation for survival yet in progress. It is hardly absolute in itself as it morphs into its next iteration.
We understand photographic principles, so capturing light and constructing a subsequent image based upon all of our seeing and camera limitations, is our charge.
In its' early years photographs were considered factual representations for their ability to record a perspective from one part of the world to another. It was a matter of the conveyance of experience to people who would otherwise not have access to it. It was considered a faithful rendition, even a truth. It was one thing to see a heroic view in the painting of The Charge of the Light Brigade, the Battle of Balaclava, by Charlton, and quite another to view the devastation of Matthew Brady's body strewn battlefields in our civil War. It changed how we, as a species, how we thought of war.
The chaos that is our universe is apprehended by processes which attempt to embrace it, even with imperfect methods, to arrest it in time. Very few of us ever transcend that. Much of our experience is a reverberation of vision as it is apprehended by a mind that receives it in the context of its experience. The dissonance we experience when what comes before us is not what we expect describes that process. For most of us, the 2-dimensional representation of chaos is as much truth as our modest day-to-day intellect can handle.
Churchill spoke about how it failed but I'm not sure where. It could have been the spirit of an image or a lack of detail for his purposes; the dissonance. He just wanted Karsh to give him cigar back. And so he rejected photography as a truth, albeit better than others. Everyman, however, doesn't throw out the baby with the bathwater.