The Memory Maker
Recently, OpenAI sunsetted their immersive video ap, Sora, but the false memories it helped create will remain. Today, for Longreads, neuroscientist Tim Requarth explores how Sora helped users to believe they had done things they quite clearly had not.
Of course, there’s one big difference between Loftus’s memory of the house fire and Deutsch’s fanciful scaling of Lincoln’s nose. One was real, the other wasn’t. Not only unreal, but unlikely. “I would make a distinction between something that’s plausible and implausible,” she said. “If suddenly there’s a picture of you in a Russian prison in Siberia and you’ve never been, you’re obviously going to be able to reject it. Maybe you’ll have a weird feeling seeing yourself, but you’re just going to know you’ve never been.”
Fair enough. I started to think that maybe it’s a stretch to say that Deutsch’s “twitch of confusion” is anything to be concerned about. But then I talked to another Sora user and things got weirder.
Check out The Memory Maker.
