Advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) have driven a growing effort to create digital duplicates. These semi-autonomous recreations of living and dead people can be used for many purposes. Some of these purposes include tutoring, coping with grief, and attending business meetings. However, the normative implications of digital duplicates remain obscure, particularly considering the possibility of them being applied to genocide memory and education. To address this gap, we examine normative possibilities and risks associated with the use of more advanced forms of generative AI-enhanced duplicates for transmitting Holocaust survivor testimonies. We first review the historical and contemporary uses of survivor testimonies. Then, we scrutinize the possible benefits of using digital duplicates in this context and apply the Minimally Viable Permissibility Principle (MVPP). The MVPP is an analytical framework for evaluating the risks of digital duplicates. It includes five core components: the need for authentic presence, consent, positive value, transparency, and harm-risk mitigation. Using MVPP, we identify potential harms digital duplicates might pose to different actors, including survivors, users, and developers. We also propose technical and socio-technical mitigation strategies to address these harms.

The nexus of artificial intelligence (AI) and memory is typically theorized as a ‘hybrid’ or ‘symbiosis’ between humans and machines. The dangers related to this nexus are subsequently imagined as tilting the power balance between its two components, such that humanity loses control over its perception of the past to the machines. In this article, I propose a new interpretation: AI, I posit, is not merely a non-human agency that changes mnemonic processes, but rather a window through which the past itself gains agency and extends into the present. This interpretation holds two advantages. First, it reveals the full scope of the AI–memory nexus. If AI is an interactive extension of the past, rather than a technology acting upon it, every application of it constitutes an act of memory. Second, rather than locating AI’s power along familiar axes – between humans and machines, or among competing social groups – it reveals a temporal axis of power: between the present and the past. In the article’s final section, I illustrate the utility of this approach by applying it to the legal system’s increasing dependence on machines, which, I claim, represents not just a technical but a mnemonic shift, where the present is increasingly falling under the dominion of the past – embodied by AI.

This study addresses how AI-generated images of war are changing the making of memory. Instead of asking how AI-generated images affect individual recall, we focus on how they communicate specific representations, recognising that such portrayals can cultivate particular assumptions and beliefs. Drawing on memory of the multitude, visual social semiotics, and cultivation/desensitisation theories, we analyse how visual generative AI mediates the representation of the Russia-Ukraine war. Our corpus includes 200 images of the Russia-Ukraine war generated from 23 prompts across proprietary and open-source visual generative AI systems. The findings indicate that visual generative AI tends to present a sanitised view of the war. Critical aspects, such as death, injury, and suffering of children and refugees are often excluded. Furthermore, a disproportional focus on urban areas misrepresents the full scope of the war. Visual generative AI, we argue, introduces a new dimension to memory making in that it blends documentation with speculative fiction by synthesising the multitude embedded within the visual memory of war archives, historical biases, representational limitations, and commercial risk aversion. By foregrounding the socio-technical and discursive dimensions of synthetic war content, this study contributes to an interdisciplinary dialogue on collective memory at the intersection of visual communication studies, media studies, and memory studies by providing empirical insights into how generative AI mediates the visual representation of war through human-archival-mechanistic entanglements.

This article explores the transformational potential of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI (genAI) – large language models (LLMs), chatbots, and AI-driven smart assistants yet to emerge – to reshape human cognition, memory, and creativity. First, the paper investigates the potential of genAI tools to enable a new form of human-computer co-remembering, based on prompting rather than traditional recollection. Second, it examines the individual, cultural, and social implications of co-creating with genAI for human creativity. These phenomena are explored through the concept of Homo Promptus, a figure whose cognitive processes are shaped by engagement with AI. Two speculative scenarios illustrate these dynamics. The first, ‘prompting to remember’, analyses genAI tools as cognitive extensions that offload memory work to machines. The second scenario, ‘prompting to create’, explores changes in creativity when performing together with genAI tools as co-creators. By mobilising concepts from cognitive psychology, media and memory studies, together with Huizinga’s exploration of play, and Rancière’s intellectual emancipation, this study argues that genAI tools are not only reshaping how humans remember and create but also redefining cultural and social norms. It concludes by calling for ‘critical’ engagement with the societal and intellectual implications of AI, advocating for research that fosters adaptive and independent (meta)cognitive practices to reconcile digital innovation with human agency.

This short research article interrogates the rise of digital platforms that enable ‘synthetic afterlives’, with a focus on how deathbots – AI-driven avatar interactions grounded in personal data and recordings – reshape memory practices. Drawing on socio-technical walkthroughs of four platforms – Almaya, HereAfter, Séance AI, and You, Only Virtual – we analyse how they frame, archive, and algorithmically regenerate memories. Our findings reveal a central tension: between preserving the past as a fixed archive and continually reanimating it through generative AI. Our walkthroughs demonstrate how these services commodify remembrance, reducing memory to consumer-driven interactions designed for affective engagement while obscuring the ethical, epistemological and emotional complexities of digital commemoration. In doing so, they enact reductive forms of memory that are embedded within platform economies and algorithmic imaginaries.

This article argues that the environmental contexts of memory are vulnerable to Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated distortions. By addressing the broader ecological implications for AI’s integration into society, this article looks beyond a sociotechnical dimension to explore the potential for AI to complicate environmental memory and its role in shaping human–environment relations. First, I address how the manipulation and falsification of memory risks undermining intergenerational transmission of environmental knowledge. Second, I examine how AI-generated blurring of boundaries between real and unreal can lead to collective inaction on environmental challenges. By identifying memory’s central role in addressing environmental crisis, this article places emerging debates on memory in the AI era in direct conversation with environmental discourse and scholarship.

This paper is written at a tipping point in the development of generative AI and related technologies and services, which heralds a new battleground between humans and computers in the shaping of reality. Large language models (LLMs) scrape vast amounts of data from the so called ‘publicly available' internet, enabling new ways for the past to be represented and reimagined at scale, for individuals and societies. Moreover, generative AI changes what memory is and what memory does, pushing it beyond the realm of individual, human influence, and control, yet at the same time offering new modes of expression, conversation, creativity, and ways of overcoming forgetting. I argue here for a ‘third way of memory’, to recognise how the entanglements between humans and machines both enable and endanger human agency in the making and the remixing of individual and collective memory. This includes the growth of AI agents, with increasing autonomy and infinite potential to make, remake, and repurpose individual and collective pasts, beyond human consent and control. This paper outlines two key developments of generative AI-driven services: firstly, they untether the human past from the present, producing a past that was never actually remembered in the first place, and, secondly, they usher in a new ‘conversational’ past through the dialogical construction of memory in the present. Ultimately, developments in generative AI are making it more difficult for us to recognise the human influence on, and pathways from, the past, and that human agency over remembering and forgetting is increasingly challenged.

This article is a commentary on the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), capitalism, and memory. The political policies of neoliberalism have reduced the capacity of individuals and groups to reflect on and change the social world, meanwhile applications of AI and algorithmic technologies, rooted in the profit-seeking objectives of global capitalism, deepen this deficit. In these conditions, memory in individuals and across society is at risk of becoming myopic. In this article, I develop the concept of myopic memory with two core claims. Firstly, I argue that AI is a technological development that cannot be divorced from the capitalist conditions from which it comes from and is implemented in service of. To this end, I reveal capitalism and colonialism's historical and contemporary use of surveillance as a way to control the populations it oppresses, imagining their pasts to determine their futures, disempowering them in the process. My second core claim emphasises that this process of disempowerment is undergoing an acute realisation four decades into the period of neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies have restructured society on the basis of being an individual consumer, leaving little time, space, and institutional capacity for citizens to reflect on their impact or challenge their dominance. As a result, with the growing role of AI and algorithmic technologies in shaping our engagement with society along similar lines of individualism, it is my conclusion that the scope of memory is being reduced and constrained within the prism of capitalism, reducing its potential, and rendering it myopic.