School of Social and Political Science

Description

The 2020s are marked by a convergence of huge computing power with the greatest memory dump in history. The digital participation of billions – producing, exposing and sharing data and information about personal and public selves and experiences – has forged an astonishing shadow archive of us. This has been waiting for something to render it accessible, meaningful, usable, on a planetary scale. That time has come, and that something is generative artificial intelligence.

Generative AI changes what memory is and what memory does, pushing it beyond the realm of individual, human influence and control, yet at the same time offering new modes of expression, conversation, creativity, and ways of overcoming forgetting.

I argue here for a ‘third way’ of memory, an approach that recognises how the related growing autonomy and infinite potential of AI agents (bots and services) to be remade and repurposed and to remember, semi or fully independently of human consent and control, smashes the once more distinct individual, social, archival and generational boundaries of the past. The third way of memory also highlights the overlooked relationship between memory and privacy, to see large language models and the digital content and data which they are fed, as super archives of us.

This talk outlines two key developments of generative AI driven services: firstly, they untether the human past from the present, producing a past that was never actually remembered in the first place, and, secondly, AI ushers in a new conversational past through the dialogical construction of memory in the present.

Ultimately, developments in generative AI are making it more difficult to recognise the human influence on, and pathways from, the past, and that human agency over remembering and forgetting is increasingly challenged.

About the speaker:

Andrew Hoskins is Interdisciplinary Professor of Global Security in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He has been researching the relationship between media, war and memory for over 20 years.

He is founding Co Editor-in-Chief of the Cambridge Journal of Memory, Mind & Media, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Digital War, founding Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Memory Studies, and founding Co-Editor of the Palgrave Memory Studies Book Series.

He is author/editor of 10 books, including: Radical War: Data, Attention & Control in the Twenty-First Century (Hurst/OUP 2022, with Matthew Ford) and The Remaking of Memory in the Age of the Internet and Social Media (OUP 2024, co-edited with Qi Wang).

He holds an ERC/UKRI Advanced Grant ‘The New War Front: Digital Participation in War’ (2025-2030).