You may have seen videos circulating online of Donald Trump and Elon Musk doing outlandish things – recreating scenes from the TV show Breaking Bad, for example. You may have also seen footage of them getting down to the Village People’s hit ‘YMCA’ during a New Year’s Eve party.
The thing is, one of these things really happened and the other is a fiction created with artificial intelligence (AI). You might remember both, but can you remember which is which*?
In psychology, a ‘source monitoring framework’ describes the processes involved in identifying where our memories originated.
The framework records the source of a memory as one piece of information. It gets encoded into the memory alongside other aspects of what we experienced.
The ‘tag’ that states where the memory came from can easily fade though, even while other aspects of the memory persist.
In this way, clips generated by AI run the risk of blurring with real-world events in our minds. And this is a problem that could get worse as AI video improves.
This separation between a memory’s content versus its source happens all the time. How often do you recognise an actor’s face on-screen, but despite their familiarity, you can’t recall what other films or TV shows you’ve seen them in?
These same memory failures help explain how easy it is to form ‘false memories’, as shown by the research of Prof Elizabeth Loftus.
She observed that when certain ideas are suggested to us by others, we conjure them in our own minds, but later on we forget where the ideas initially came from. They can then be easily mistaken for events that actually happened to us.
Based on Loftus’s findings, it seems likely that AI will be able to plant many false memories in our minds, especially if we consume the artificial content in a similar setting to where we consume real news.
As such, there are important discussions to be had about the way we brand AI generated content to make it easier to remember it’s not real.
*For the record, the dancing at the New Year's Eve party was real.
This article is an answer to the question (asked by Christopher Wiley, Birmingham) 'Is artificial intelligence giving us false memories?'
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