[Commlist] New book: The AI Memory Machine

New book:
The AI Memory Machine
Why the past is all over
Andrew Hoskins, Kristina Cimova, and Danny Pilkington
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-ai-memory-machine-9780198995906

Description

The AI Memory Machine tells the story of the forces and consequences of 
the twenty-first century's AI machinic revolution of memory.

Generative AI has turbocharged the technologies of memory to find, 
capture, and mine the individual as the pre-eminent commodity of this 
age. It is a paradoxical set of social and technological conditions for 
memory, guided by the framework of capitalism. Your past is already 
digitally marketed and exploited, with every message, like, and swipe 
accumulating a life already shared, traceable, hackable, saleable, and 
memorable.

This new AI industry of memory determines who controls the memory 
machine, through the apps, platforms, devices, and services, which 
enable our capturing, sharing, and re-generation of data and information 
about ourselves and experiences. This work tackles these machinic and 
human transformations through engaging in interdisciplinary sociological 
and human science approaches to memory studies. Drawing on interviews 
with experts in the industry of memory, it shows how memory technologies 
and wider algorithmic processes of data, duplicate, displace, and 
substitute for the once human.

As the AI Memory Machine messes with the cognitive and social forces and 
boundaries of remembering, is the past already all over? Or does it give 
new hope in the revelatory potential of what can now be found and seen anew?

Authors

Andrew Hoskins is Professor of AI, Memory & War at the University of 
Edinburgh. His research focuses on digital participation in war, AI, 
media and memory, and digital anonymity. He leads the ERC advanced 
grant/UKRI-funded project WARSHARE: The New War Front: Digital 
Participation in War (2025–30), focusing on the Russian war against 
Ukraine. He is founding Co-Editor-in-Chief of Memory, Mind & Media, and 
founding Editor-in-Chief of Memory Studies. His articles include AI and 
memory, AI and collective memory, and Fall of Living Memory.

Kristina Cimova was a Postgraduate Research Associate and a Graduate 
Teaching Assistant for Central and Eastern European Studies at the 
University of Glasgow. She has since moved to geopolitical intelligence 
analysis and business resilience testing in the private sector. Her PhD 
focused on a discussion of corruption in real-life transactions in 
Central Europe, addressing the role played by collective memory in the 
understanding and taxonomy of corrupt acts in everyday contexts. She 
then completed several postdoctoral research roles, including a project 
with Prof. Hoskins, focusing on the role played by the digital in 
generating, curating, and retaining memories.

Danny Pilkington is a Postgraduate Researcher and a Graduate Teaching 
Assistant in Sociology at the University of Glasgow. His PhD focuses on 
ideology, hegemony, and British media coverage of twenty-first century 
Latin American politics. He has separately published work on the 
relationship between capitalism, AI, and memory. Danny teaches across a 
range of topics in the Media, Culture & Society subject group at the 
University of Glasgow and is a Research Assistant on different projects 
exploring the role of the media in elections.
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