People’s trust in AI is taking a dangerous new turn. Researchers are saying that AI-generated photos and summaries are successfully distorting people’s own memories.

MIT scientist Pattie Maes spoke to the Washington Post about her team’s research. Participants viewed a series of photographs, and after a break, some of the participants were shown the exact same photographs while others were shown versions altered by AI. When facing a memory test later, the people who viewed the AI-altered images were not only more likely to misremember the original image, but they were also overly confident in their false recollections.

Human memory is fickle, unreliable and highly open to suggestion. This has been covered extensively in psychological experiments dating back as far as the 19th century. That’s what makes misinformation particularly dangerous, with some studies showing that it can continue to influence decisionmaking, including political decisions, even after corrections have been issued.

The introduction of artificial intelligence only makes that dynamic more precarious. AI-generated slop is only becoming more convincing and very pervasive online, and it has been enabling and turbocharging a new wave of fraud and disinformation.

Numerous studies besides Maes’ have shown that these AI-generated pieces of misinformation have been successful at planting false memories in participants’ brains, changing what the participants know to be true. A study from last year found that both deepfakes and AI-generated texts effectively planted false memories about completely made-up political scandals, going so far as to reduce voting intention.

Even when AI is not used maliciously, it can have a potentially catastrophic influence on truth.

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