In today’s episode, you’ll discover the most dangerous application of AI: the manipulation of memory. You’ll learn how easily AI can alter photos and videos, implanting false memories and rewriting history, a capability far more accessible than ever before. You’ll gain crucial insights into protecting yourself from this threat and learn simple, practical steps to preserve the integrity of your own memories and recordings. Don’t miss this essential discussion about safeguarding truth in the age of AI.
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Machine-Generated Transcript
What follows is an AI-generated transcript. The transcript may contain errors and is not a substitute for watching the video.
In today’s episode, let’s talk about the most dangerous AI use case ever. For those unfamiliar with George Orwell’s 1984, there’s a section about rewriting history. The Ministry of Truth routinely redacted and changed newspapers, articles, and books to promote the ruling regime’s version of “truth”— “We’ve always been at war with East Asia.” This is not a new problem. Orwell wrote 1984 well before 1984, but AI makes it worse.
The most dangerous AI use case is rewriting memory. This MIT Media Lab study—let me make this a little bigger—tested whether digitally altered photos impact memory. Researchers showed test subjects a photo, distracted them, showed them an altered version, distracted them again, and then had them recall the first photo. The results were scary: AI manipulation more than doubled false recall of memories that didn’t happen. AI-generated content implanted false memories of events that never occurred. In the first example, AI-edited images altered what stuck in people’s heads. In the second, things were removed from the background, and people recalled the photo with those things removed. The implications are significant.
Digital alteration of photos is decades old—Photoshop debuted during the Reagan administration—but generative AI tools, including those in Photoshop, Dolly, and Midjourney, make it faster, easier, cheaper, and simpler to rewrite reality at scale. You don’t need to be a Photoshop expert; you can highlight an area and tell it what to change.
This is a problem because countless authoritarian leaders would love to rewrite history to their benefit, vilifying enemies and changing how people remember the past. These tools allow them to do that easily and at scale, changing how people recall events, even for those who lived through them. It’s important to note that there are valid use cases for rewriting personal history—for example, therapeutic uses to help people process trauma. But this capability is amoral; the technology exists, and we can’t put the genie back in the bottle. How we use it depends on our moral compass, which, let’s face it, isn’t always reliable.
So, how do we prevent history from being rewritten? It’s impossible to rewrite everything. When you see something potentially significant, record 10 seconds of video or take a photo and save it. Even if AI agents were deployed everywhere, they can’t rewrite things they don’t have permission to rewrite; data stored on personal devices or backup drives will be hard to alter.
When using photo editing tools like Google Photos, save the original separately to maintain a reference. Google Photos might clean up a distracting background, but you want to preserve the original if something important was happening in that background.
Reality, facts, and truth are more fragile than ever. We must do our part to reinforce them by using tools intelligently and frequently to record events, making history harder to edit for those who would manipulate it.
That’s it for today’s episode. Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time. If you enjoyed this video, please like it, subscribe, and hit the bell button for notifications. Thank you.
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Christopher S. Penn is one of the world’s leading experts on AI in marketing. Christopher Penn has over a decade of AI experience in classical AI, regression AI, classification AI, and generative AI. Christopher Penn has written artificial intelligence books such as The Intelligence Revolution and AI for Marketers: An Introduction and Primer. Christopher Penn is an AI keynote speaker around the world.
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