From a murdered teenager being interviewed as though he were alive, to a widow speaking with a chatbot made through voice cloning the digital relics of her late husband, AI-generated versions of the deceased are becoming uncanny in their humanlike form. Are personal memories, so central to our sense of personality, individuality and agency, already lost to a future in which we feel compelled to embrace the humanlike comfort of bots?Memorybot is the story of the consequences of generative AI on human memory. It reveals how in regenerating past lives, and through mining and sharing present ones, AI removes the once memorial limits of a living individual. The most traumatic and joyous parts of human existence are perpetually subject to a continuous extraction of memories. Hoskins argues that we are witnessing the emergence of a new societal paradigm, characterised by the increasing dominance of hybrid memory, the erosion of anonymity, and the effective end of human forgetting. Written by a leading international scholar of memory studies, Memorybot is a haunting read for anyone concerned about the growing influence of AI technologies and services, and for the fields of media, cultural studies, psychology, sociology, history and memory studies.
