AI Doesn't Just Lie—It Can Make You Believe It

The implanting of false memories is easier than you think, even without tech manipulation.

- F.D. Flam

One of the more subtle and insidious threats posed by artificial intelligence (AI) and related technology is its ability to tamper with memories.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has spent the past 50 years demonstrating how easily humans can be manipulated into remembering things that never happened—especially in the hands of prosecutors and police questioning witnesses.

Now, the professor at the University of California, Irvine, has teamed up with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to explore how AI can manipulate what we think we remember. This manipulation occurs even when subjects know they are looking at AI-generated text and images. The findings suggest that AI could amplify humans' ability to implant false memories.

In a famous series of experiments starting in the 1970s, Professor Loftus showed that with the right suggestions, psychologists could implant memories that people had been lost in a shopping center as children, or that they had been sickened by eggs or strawberry ice cream at a picnic. The latter actually turned people off from wanting those foods.

Despite the evidence, we still can't shake the idea that memory is like a tape recording of events—and that misperception of our own minds makes us vulnerable.

"People who adhere to this tape-recorder model of memory don't seem to appreciate that memory is a constructive process," Prof Loftus said, explaining that our brains build memories from bits and pieces acquired at different times. We intuitively understand forgetting as losing or fading memories, but not the addition of false details.