Past event
CIMS Seminar "Synthetic Memory: AI and the end of the human past" given by Professor Andrew Hoskins
CIMS invites you to the CIMS Seminar, “Synthetic Memory: AI and the end of the human past” given by Professor Andrew Hoskins, University of Edinburgh (personal chair in AI, Memory and War)
Reception to Follow
Abstract
Human memories are lively, they feel part of us as core to our identity, offering coherence and continuity to how we see ourselves in the world and how the world sees us. But when the new you is a training model, when bots outnumber and outremember us, when digital trails haunt beyond generations, when forgetting needs a service industry, we have arrived at the end of the human past.
Today's rapid development of Generative AI, has slammed the breaks on human ends, making abundant something that both reappropriates and replaces what was once an inevitably dissipating and scarce past.
The resulting synthetic memory does not possess the same fragility of finitude as other forms of (technologically shaped or otherwise) memories. Rather it dissolves the bounds of human living memory and that which remains, ushering in a multi-generational haunting of an inescapable past.
In this talk I explore how Generative AI is ushering in a new paradigm of synthetic memory through three key interrelated forces, namely: (1) the human making of memory pushed out-of-the-loop (agentic turn); (2) the end of anonymity (the past is watching you); and (3) the end of forgetting (multi-generational haunting).
Professor Andrew Hoskins holds a personal chair in AI, Memory and War, at the University of Edinburgh. He founded and edits the journals of Memory, Mind & Media, Memory Studies, and Digital War. He is the author/editor of 11 books, including: Sharded Media: Trump's Rage Against the Mainstream (Palgrave 2025, with William Merrin); Radical War: Data, Attention & Control in the Twenty-First Century (Hurst/OUP 2022, with Matthew Ford) and The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media (OUP 2024, co-edited with Qi Wang).
He holds an ERC/UKRI Advanced Grant ‘The New War Front: Digital Participation in War' (2025-2030).
@andrewhoskins.bsky.social