AI & collective memory

Abstract

In this review, I show how Generative AI (GAI) utterly transforms how we represent, access, expose and cover, find and lose, sanitise and toxify, use and abuse, and communicate with, the past.

The term ‘collective memory’ has become common parlance for an array of constructive and nefarious uses of the shared past. It is often seen as related to the lifespan of an individual, or a group or generation who lived through or experienced a particular era or event, affording some kind of shared experience that is strengthened by the presence of or connection to others in common. In this way, the collective, as with an individual's memory has its limits, it dies out.

However, particularly since the late twentieth century, the term has acquired a mythical form, with publics, institutions and scholars, imagining in its nature, function and extended duration, for a variety of ends. These imaginaries are often tied to assumptions around the unifying nature of the technologies and media of memory of the day.

I argue here that today's agentic turn by contrast offers no such prospects for collective memory, mythical or otherwise. Rather, Generative and Agentic AI's extracting, remixing and replaying of interactions, shards you and your identities anew, rendering it difficult to imagine a group, experience or event, around which a collective memory could cohere. Instead, individuals and societies are subject to a black box memory of impossible provenance, where human agency in shaping what the past becomes is in retreat.