By F.D. Flam,  Bloomberg

One of the more subtle and insidious threats posed by artificial intelligence and related technology is its ability to tamper with memories.

Psychologist Elizabeth Loftus has spent the last 50 years demonstrating how easily humans can be manipulated into remembering things that never happened — especially in the hands of prosecutors and police questioning witnesses.

Now Loftus, a professor at the University of California, Irvine, has teamed up with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to explore how AI can manipulate what we think we remember. This manipulation occurs even when subjects know they’re looking at AI-generated text and images. The findings suggest that artificial intelligence could amplify humans’ ability to implant false memories.

Memory manipulation, notes Pat Pataranutaporn, a researcher with the MIT Media Lab, is a very different process from fooling people with deep-fakes. You don’t need to create an elaborate fake of, say, the New York Times website — you just have to convince people they read something there in the past. "People don’t usually question their own memory,” he said.

Pataranutaporn was the lead author of three memory experiments, the first of which showed how chatbot interrogators can alter witness testimony simply by embedding suggestions into their questions — an AI extension of Loftus’ earlier work on human interrogations.

In that study, participants watched video footage of an armed robbery. Some were then asked misleading questions, such as: "Was there a security camera near the place the robbers parked the car?” About a third of those participants later recalled seeing the robbers arrive by car. There was no car. The false memory persisted even a week later.