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Can AI Preserve Your Most Precious Memories? | Pau Aleikum Garcia | TED

“Memories are the architects of our identity,” says technologist Pau Aleikum Garcia, but they’re not permanent. Photos can be lost amid political unrest or natural disaster, while illnesses like Alzhemier’s can rob people of their past. He puts forward a novel solution — “synthetic memories,” or dreamlike visualizations of long-gone moments created through generative AI…

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“Memories are the architects of our identity,” says technologist Pau Aleikum Garcia, but they’re not permanent. Photos can be lost amid political unrest or natural disaster, while illnesses like Alzhemier’s can rob people of their past. He puts forward a novel solution — “synthetic memories,” or dreamlike visualizations of long-gone moments created through generative AI — and explores how it could reconnect families or even enhance cognitive abilities. (Recorded at TED2024 on April 18, 2024)

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21 Comments

21 Comments

  1. @DJTechnosapien

    October 2, 2024 at 7:05 am

    The answer is yes. Anything a mind can do, AI will be able to replicate with enough time

    • @fburton8

      October 2, 2024 at 7:42 am

      Memories that can effectively be turned into words or pictures, yes, but what about memories of smell and feel. Wouldn’t the AI need to have some way of sensing these things like we do, and storing and accessing them with the same qualities as perceived or experienced by a person?

  2. @ShanelShow

    October 2, 2024 at 7:24 am

    *Who love TRUMP 6 ?? ????*

  3. @padlockeussy

    October 2, 2024 at 7:51 am

    Humans are just organic AI

  4. @lakenkennedy3800

    October 2, 2024 at 8:12 am

    This is a TON of fun to do with dreams and DallE.

  5. @kindofbluenyc

    October 2, 2024 at 8:26 am

    Fascinating

  6. @jackmen4

    October 2, 2024 at 8:47 am

    Ai will alter your memories.

  7. @jordanetherington1922

    October 2, 2024 at 9:16 am

    We have photos and books and already existing storage mediums. LLMs are not helpful for this and cause massive environmental damage. Pass.

  8. @mervinmarias9283

    October 2, 2024 at 9:37 am

    I suspect when age reversal therapies go mainstream, this is how people will keep their sanity.

  9. @TheRealASN

    October 2, 2024 at 9:48 am

    We are on the edge of a digital afterlife option

  10. @AdvantestInc

    October 2, 2024 at 11:21 am

    The intersection of AI and memory preservation opens up so many possibilities. It’s amazing to see how technology can help individuals reconnect with lost moments, especially for those affected by cognitive decline.

    • @finlaywhiskard3965

      October 4, 2024 at 10:51 am

      bot comment

  11. @Zenotes

    October 2, 2024 at 12:40 pm

    Esto solo funciona si tienes imagenes previas de alguien, menos no podria ya que su memoria al no conocerlos inconscientemente no despertara ningun recuerdo.

  12. @nilsdula7693

    October 2, 2024 at 4:39 pm

    The subtitles are wrong at 10:44, it’s a quote in Catalan, not Spanish.

  13. @KarstenJohansson

    October 3, 2024 at 12:16 am

    If AI can’t preserve your precious memories, a diary and photo album certainly can. Is this really a problem for AI to solve? And we live in a culture where people take pictures of every damn meal they eat, and are unlikely to ever look back at those pics ever again. Showing them to friends is worse than the 70’s when people showed off their wallet pics of the wife and children. The idea that AI would be good at this will be so much worse than that dreadful wallet draw.

  14. @Tazer_Silverscar

    October 7, 2024 at 12:03 pm

    No, no it can’t. The problem is that the more you allow AI to tamper with photos the more it can be used for ill – for example to plant potentially dangerous memories that did not happen. The human memory is already known to be fallible even before you take into account things like Alzhemier’s. Also the therapy they are talking about, which they’re wanting to inject AI into – it already exists without AI. They were ALREADY doing it. They’re trying to inject a novelty into it to prove it’s ‘better’ than the current solution, but the problem is novelty only provides limited benefit, like a short term energy boost. The existing therapy already does this too.

    “We have no tools that can help us understand a time that was not ours.” Yes we do, it’s called ART. The reason why you’re dismissing art is because art takes time to make. You want a convenient instant cure that does away with the need for true human imagination.

    These people are digging around to try to find some magic thing that Generative AI can do really well that proves it has value. And I wish they’d stop, because not only is the energy it consumes by and large way over anything else, it’s also just proof that these developers are either extremely ignorant of its misuse, OR that the misuse they refuse to address is the actual purpose of what they’re developing. Tech developers should get back to developing technology to help us with menial tasks instead of doing screwed up things like trying to replace our brains and trying to put creative people out of jobs.

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