Imagining Human-AI Memory Symbiosis

In this article, we critically examine the history of artificial intelligence (ai) to explore how it can shape the future of collective memory. By situating our work within critical debates that challenge the dominant anthropomorphising discourse of ai, we scrutinise how ai specificities shape its interactions with information about the past. We highlight how the development of ai has been often misremembered in public discourse, and by extension in the humanities, and explore the consequences for ai’s emerging status as a form of media memory. Based on our exploration, we outline three scenarios for the future of ai-shaped collective memory: 1) the reiteration of the simulative paradigm of ai media memory; 2) the enfolding of ai as an alien actant in human (memory) collectives; and 3) the recognition of the radical alterity of ai for human-ai memory symbiosis.