By Jackie Flynn Mogensen

SHOULD WE CHANGE HOW WE LOOK AT VIDEOS?

To help address the problems that can arise when different people interpret video evidence differently, Ristovska says viewers should slow down and “engage with this material more thoughtfully.”

And Feigenson recommends viewers recognize that “other reasonable people may reasonably see things differently,” adding that “this can help temper the overconfidence in video evidence that naive realism tends to engender.”

Adding artificially generated videos into the mix only complicates things. In 2025 Loftus, in collaboration with her colleagues at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, published a paper that demonstrated how artificial intelligence can change people’s memory of an image.

Participants were shown different images, including a photograph of a man and a woman who weren’t smiling. The participants were then shown the images again, except this time the pictures had been slightly doctored using AI. In the case of the one depicting a man and a woman, the researchers tweaked the image to paste grins on them. When shown the original image with the woman’s face obscured, people subsequently falsely remembered her smiling.

The idea of AI-introduced false memories is “concerning,” says Pat Pataranutaporn, an assistant professor at the MIT Media Lab and a co-author on the study. But he hopes the findings could have positive implications, too. If people have traumatic memories, for example, “AI could help them misremember in a more positive way,” he says.