Special Collection Editors

Andrew Hoskins, Social Sciences, University of Glasgow, UK

Anthony Downey, Art and Design, Birmingham City University, UK

Amanda Lagerkvist, Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, Sweden

We are proud to announce the launch of the first Special Journal Collection on AI and MEMORY with Andrew Hoskins’ agenda setting article, AI and Memory.

We now welcome pioneering proposals in the emergent field of AI Memory Studies for publication in this collection in the Gold Open Access Cambridge Journal of Memory, Mind & Media.

This collection is launched at a tipping point in the development of AI and related technologies and services, which heralds emerging sites of contestation between humans and computers in the shaping of reality. Large language models (LLMs) scrape vast amounts of so-called ‘publicly available’ data from the internet, thus enabling new ways for the past—for individuals and societies alike—to be represented and reimagined at an unprecedented scale. This epochal shift from human reliance to dependency on smart or web-based technologies and networks for imagining the past has, from the early part of this century, come to define the terms of our basic sociality, interpersonal relationships, education, everyday communications, and work practices.

However, the 2020s are ushering in the new capacity of Generative AI and supported services to deliver on the much heralded yet undelivered promise made of digital technologies and media. More recently, these developments have been focused on so-called Agentic AI, or systems that display the characteristics of autonomy, intentionality, and models of independent decision-making. These emergent forces increasingly bring the past into the orbit of machinic oversight and control. This apparent realisation of a once fictional and hypothetical prophecy, that of a total memory, is likewise driven by an all-encompassing drive to archive and code life itself.

A key concern here is in how AI and, in particular, Generative and Agentic AI are both transformative of and a threat to individual agency over the remembering and forgetting of the past. These pasts, increasingly produced through an array of devices and services that we devote ourselves to recording the details and minutiae of our lives, is made ‘accessible’ through AI-generated programs that bury the origins, selections and orderings of memory in opaque data networks. In this way, the operative logic of AI and its generative capacity is realising new pasts without our consent.

The same processes involved in the scraping of the internet, alongside the repurposing and reengineering of data through chatbots and other tools, also remodel and reimagine the domains and the interplay between individual cognitive remembering—not to mention forgetting—and the outside world: between, that is, memory ‘in the head’ and ‘in the wild’ (Barnier & Hoskins 2018).

With most technological advances that somewhat analogously replace or augment human practices, much of the debate today concerns whether technology is the issue, or the people, companies, organisations, regulatory bodies, and systems tasked with its development, application and selling. The tension we describe here is symptomatic of a wider social, political, and scientific debate around the implications of using AI technology to augment and extend personal and collective human experiences, productive capacities and—specifically in relation to the focus of this collection—the event of remembering and forgetting.

We likewise observe here that the underlying principle of anticipation, or prediction, is foundational to the development of AI and its relentless archiving of the past (in the form of data patterns) in order to forecast the future. To this end, any discussion of AI and memory is not solely about the past—which is and remains invariably contested—as it is about how we will encounter, understand and engage with the future.

To address these and other concerns, we welcome abstract proposals (max 500 words) for innovative and interdisciplinary interventions which offer original research/insights on one of more of the topics below. Article types may include: Research Articles (6-8K words); Short Research Articles (up to 4K words); Field Reviews; Case Studies; Commentaries; Dialogues; Responses; Editorials; Images, Artworks, and Video Essays (full details here: https://shorturl.at/g6sef).

Topics

Interdisciplinary Field of AI Memory Studies

Relationship between cognitive, collective and cultural domains of remembering and forgetting

Memory and forgetting ecologies

Data, archives, justice and accountability

Digital afterlife: grief tech, deadbots

The conversational past

AI’s memory

AI agents, or Agentic AI

Forgetting, erasure, data decay

Deep fakes, disinformation, provenance, trust

Superintelligence

Extended mind

Anti/autobiographical memory

Reminiscence therapy

Amnesia, dementia, and models of AI-powered therapy

Shaping of Identity – individual, group, community, societal

Memory of futures of social robots

Silicon Valley

Synthetic voices of the dead and mnemonic technologies

Law, regulation and governance

Sanitising the past

Techno-moral futures

Existential media

Algorithmic and automated pasts

Weaponisation and autonomous systems

Neoliberalism, capitalism, agency and utility of memory.

Privacy, anonymity and memory

Memory and the future, anticipation, premediation

 

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Timeline and procedure

500 word abstracts should be sent to memorycambridge@gmail.com 

The Special Collection is now live and if your abstract is accepted then we will invite your submission at any time, with publication in around 10 weeks following successful completion of peer review.

Abstracts should indicate:

• Topic coverage, key research questions, ideas
• Theory and method as appropriate (key references)
• Originality and interdisciplinary contribution (relevance to this journal)

Please also state article type (see above list) and provide 6-8 keywords.

Please use the above email address to consult with the Special Collection Editors about your article ideas and potential angles or approaches.

Invited paper submissions will be submitted directly to the submission site for Memory, Mind & Media: https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mmm where they will undergo peer review following the usual procedures of Memory, Mind & Media.