I work in AI and I can assure you these technologies are not magic but just tools with immense flaws and limitations.
I am a human being and I can assure you that I am an organic entity with abilities handed down to me from millions of years of evolution but nevertheless I am an organic entity with immense flaws and limitations.
The core issue which we are embarking into this century is that the people want to monetize these simple AI technologies by just tapping into my evolutionary flaws and limitations and amplify it,
If you are intelligent and aware then you can use these tools enhance your prefrontal cortex and without giving a dime nor data to the assholes in silicon valley. Only if you are aware…
A very good piece by Tim Requarth: The Memory Maker
To understand why we’re so susceptible to false memories requires understanding that the brain doesn’t store memories the way a phone stores photos. When you live through something, your hippocampus— a deep brain structure vaguely shaped like a seahorse—encodes that experience by binding together its constituent pieces: what you saw, what you heard, where you were, how you felt. That bound-together pattern is the memory. Over hours and days, the hippocampus replays these patterns, perhaps while you sleep, gradually strengthening their hold in the cortex, in a process called consolidation. What makes these memories so unlike phone storage, and especially relevant here, is that recalling a memory means the brain must partially relive it. The brain recalls by reactivating some of the same sensory and spatial patterns that were present during the original experience. Your brain doesn’t access a stable, static stored memory of yourself at that summer picnic in the park; your brain recreates it by activating some of the same neural circuitry that fired when you were actually squinting in the sun, actually wiggling your toes in the warmed grass. During recall, it fires again, faintly.
The beauty of memory, not as a static storage bank but as a dynamic process of on-demand re-creation, is that it’s efficient. You can access a tremendous amount of information about your past without having to dedicate special storage space to your personal archive. But that efficiency comes with risks. Each time you replay and reconsolidate a memory, it can subtly change. Other things you’re thinking about during recall, how you feel while recalling it, other, similar memories that activate similar patterns of neurons, these can mix and mingle and, ultimately, change the reconsolidation of the original memory itself. And once changed, it doesn’t revert because there is no gold-standard stored version. There is only the latest replay. And because memories are, essentially, reactivations of specific patterns of sensory and other neural activity, that means that sensory patterns alone can get consolidated as memories. This is a false memory. And a false memory, once seeded, benefits from the same machinery as real ones. And the brain’s fact-checker, the prefrontal cortex, arrives late to the scene: the reactivation of sensory and other neural pathways is already underway, the memory reconstruction already in progress, before any evaluation of whether the memory is genuine even begins.
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Piech’s experience suggests that Sora videos could activate spatial memory, meaning that Sora videos also tripped up the brain’s more fundamental systems for sorting real from imagined. “Although it may be disconcerting to contemplate,” as cognitive psychologist Marcia K. Johnson wrote in a 2006 paper, “true and false memories arise in the same way. Memories are attributions that we make about our mental experiences based on their subjective qualities, our prior knowledge and beliefs, our motives and goals, and the social context.” Johnson’s work on source monitoring, which is the brain’s process for sorting reality from imagination, revealed there’s no tag, no stamp in the brain that says this actually happened. Instead, a scene’s qualities during recall—how vivid it is, how spatially coherent, whether it arrives unbidden or requires effort to reconstruct—are what make it feel real or imagined. Memories of actual events are usually richer, more embedded in space and context. Imagined scenes, or recollections of scenes from movies, tend to feel thinner, more schematic. But the distributions overlap, and the brain relies on these imperfect cues to sort memory from imagination.
The trouble is that these cues can mislead. If remembering a synthetic experience activates the brain just widely enough—rich perceptual detail, spatial depth, the feeling of having been somewhere, of having been with someone—it stops registering as fantasy and starts registering as memory. Piech’s recollection of Sora generations were arriving with enough of those qualities to blur the distinction.
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One potential consequence is how these tools could shape identity, at scale. I was particularly taken by a term Deutsch coined: propagandi, or propaganda directed at yourself. If propaganda works by shaping collective memory, propagandi is more atomized, more intimate. You’re the propagandist and the mark, constructing a version of yourself that doesn’t exist, for an audience of one. I called Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams to help me stress-test Deutsch’s speculation. McAdams developed the influential concept of narrative identity—the idea that identity is built from autobiographical memories, that the self you’ll be tomorrow is constructed from the memories you have today. Contaminate the memories, and the identity may shift. When I described what Sora users like Deutsch were experiencing, McAdams said he hadn’t heard of the phenomenon yet, “but a moment’s reflection suggests that it is inevitable.” These AI videos could “ultimately be encoded and reworked as ‘things that happened to me,’ and then perhaps ‘important things that happened to me that are now part of my life story.’” Propagandi, in other words, isn’t just a clever coinage. It names a mechanism for rewriting who you are.
A hopeful read isn’t hard to find. Piech made a K-pop dance video of herself, fluid and confident, moving in ways she can’t. After watching it a few times, she told me, she started to feel like maybe she actually could. Athletes have used visualization for decades; maybe Sora was just a more vivid format. Therapists working with trauma have long known that memory can be beneficially malleable; perhaps tools like Sora, carefully deployed, could help people revise the scenes that haunt them.
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But something else was nagging at me, in addition to the potential psychological consequences: Even something as intimate as autobiographical memory doesn’t form in isolation. It’s fundamentally social. In a process scientists endearingly call maternal reminiscing, children learn to shape experience into story through dialogue with caregivers, a process that continues throughout life: the friend who leans in or looks skeptical, the partner who remembers it differently, the listener who asks a question that reframes the whole event. Even the distraction level of the listener can affect how well we remember our own memories. In one experiment, a psychologist had participants tell a story to a friend who was secretly distracted. A month later, the speakers remembered their own experience less well simply because of how a listener behaved during their retelling of it. The attentive listener isn’t just receiving the memory; they’re helping to construct it.
Now imagine referencing something your friend doesn’t share, because it never happened. The blank look. The awkward silence. You might question yourself, wondering if you imagined it. You might question them. Or you might learn to stop bringing it up altogether, retreating from actual human social interaction to more AI simulacra of human social interactions, which never push back, which always affirm. The false memory, born in isolation, produces isolation again when it enters conversation.
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Some nights after our son is asleep, my wife and I sit on the couch and reconstruct the day for each other. What he said at breakfast, the weird thing he did with his yogurt spoon, whether the stalling tactics at bedtime were really that outlandish or whether we were both just tired. Sometimes we seem to disagree on the details, even if we were both there. She’ll point out something I didn’t notice, or I’ll interpret something we both noticed differently, or she’ll add a layer of interpretation by connecting his actions to similar actions the day before. The narrative shifts a little, adjusts a little to accommodate both of us, and by the time we’ve moved on we both begin to consolidate memories of something neither of us quite experienced—which, in the end, is the uncomfortable truth: Memory and experience are not synonymous. I used to think of this process as more akin to fact-checking, of sifting fact from embellishment, reality from interpretation. But it’s not quite that. It’s something more meaningful than checking facts: sitting there, remembering them together.