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AI tweaks to photos and videos can alter our memories

It has become trivially easy to use artificial intelligence to edit images or generate video to remove unwanted objects or beautify scenes, but doing so leads to people misremembering what they have seen

By Matthew Sparkes

26 September 2024

Two versions of the same picture, one altered by AI

A pair of images used to assess people’s memory, the right-hand one altered to change who was in the race

MIT Media Lab

Human memories can be distorted by photos and videos edited by artificial intelligence (AI), raising concerns over what might happen if such manipulation becomes an automatic feature of smartphones.

Samantha Chan at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and her colleagues recruited 200 people – 100 male and 100 female – and showed the same collection of 24 photographs. They then gave them an unconnected task that took 2 minutes to complete.

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