“Nostalgia is a sweet, incurable disease,” I remember posting this on one of my social feeds sometime back.
Now, why did this particular thought—and not anything else—surface as I began writing this post?
My best guess is that this post is about memories and AI, and because I’m generally a nostalgic creature, that’s what my brain came up with. But we would never know for sure.
These days, the increasingly capable AIs remember a lot of things, including from past conversations with you. And they are getting better at providing more relevant or contextual answers to your prompts.
But…but…
For all their monstrous computational prowess and the supposed ‘smarts’ of remembering, the AIs do not have memories—certainly not in the way humans have.
What the AIs have is a vast pool of data and the blazing-fast ability to pick out a matching pattern. It’s all statistics, mathematics, algorithms…and yes, the brute force of hundreds or thousands of CPUs and GPUs.
They can do all of that pattern-matching ad infinitum. But they have zero memories. None whatsoever.
It’s humans who have memories.
It’s humans who are transported back to a joyous moment in childhood at the touch of a scent from a favorite savory.
It’s humans who zip across time to relive their crazy youth when a song from their college days turns up on the playlist.
And it’s humans again when a blurry video—stored somewhere in the AI cloud—of their wedding makes it vivid like it was yesterday, even when it’s played thirty or forty or fifty years later.
The sounds, sights, and smells associated with each memory come calling to the doorstep of our mind as well.
AI can mimic (read ‘steal’) our art, our stories, our music. But it can never stop us from creativity and imagination (unless all you choose to do is watch reels and give bad prompts).
And, of course, no AI can make and cherish memories like we humans do. Thankfully.