Generating the past
Picture your earliest memory—the who, what, and where of it. How do you feel when you remember it?
Do you have any archival evidence of it? A photograph, a home movie, or, if you’re young enough, a social media post about it?
What if you didn’t? How would you describe the scene? Which details would you be sure to include? And how would you feel if an image-generating bot making use of artificial intelligence was able to visualize your memory for you?
Welcome to the concept of synthetic memories. They aren’t photographs. They’re visual representations of what we can remember. And, using futuristic-sounding technology that’s actually available in the present, they can help us piece together elements of our past.
Let’s visualize it
Gif: Domestic Data Streamers
Pau Garcia is the founder of Domestic Data Streamers, a design studio in Barcelona; he’s a bit of a technophile. When a friend learned he was experimenting with new AI image generators like DALL-E, she asked him to create an image of her playing with her father, who died when she was young.
She was moved by the result, and Garcia by her reaction. He and his colleagues started talking about the technology’s potential with anyone who would listen. A social worker at a nursing home soon approached the studio with an idea: Use the technology to help elderly patients with dementia to visualize their early memories.
The gif above is the “synthetic memory” Garcia and his team produced for a 96-year-old Catalonian woman in the early stages of dementia. It depicts her recollection of being with her mother on an apartment balcony overlooking La Modelo, the infamous prison in the center of Barcelona, where her father was a political prisoner during the Francoist dictatorship; from the balcony, they could see him through the window of the prison.
The woman articulated this memory in her native language of Catalan, which first had to be translated into English in order to prompt the image generator.
Note: The image-generating bots in widespread use today are biased toward American English and Western perspectives, because of their provenance. (“That’s probably why [we need] a lot of different models,” Garcia says.) For now at least, be aware of these biases and use Americanized English in your prompts for the best outcomes.
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This article originally appeared here and was republished with permission.
