Julia Shaw: belief

Transcript context

…So what you’re worried about there is that you become untethered from reality, like you fabricate too many details about the memory. If a human is interacting with AI, and the AI is telling the human what they want to hear, are you worried about over time you start to just have a very overly modified version of your past narrative? I’m not necessarily worried about the fact that AI and generative AI can create false memories. That is, again, something we’ve also been doing for a long time. Like modified photos is something pre-AI that we had that was already messing with people’s minds. Even just what you have in the frame of a shot. So if you take a holiday snap and you’re omitting a really important part of what actually happened on that holiday because you’re taking a picture of the nicest part and not the, you know, the garbage behind you. That is going to have an impact on your memory as well. And so we’ve… Versions of that have always existed. And historically, if you go even further back, I mean, in some ways we’ve never been closer to facts than we are now. There’s this whole idea of like, “Oh, we’re living in this post-truth,” or blah, blah, blah, but that is not true. I mean, we didn’t even know how to write for a long time. We had no way of reliably cataloging information, never mind the scientific method, never mind reliably sharing it with one another, or fact-checking quickly with things like Google. So I mean, we’re so close to facts, but that in some ways, I think, is the… The worry is that we’ve gotten comfortable feeling like we can just access things that aren’t modified or that are less likely to be modified, and now they’re more likely to be. And that can interface with our memories. So just a practical… Is there like a protocol for self-modifying memories so you can live a happier life?…

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