This paper is written at a tipping point in the development of generative AI and related technologies and services, which heralds a new battleground between humans and computers in the shaping of reality. Large language models (LLMs) scrape vast amounts of data from the so called ‘publicly available' internet, enabling new ways for the past to be represented and reimagined at scale, for individuals and societies. Moreover, generative AI changes what memory is and what memory does, pushing it beyond the realm of individual, human influence, and control, yet at the same time offering new modes of expression, conversation, creativity, and ways of overcoming forgetting. I argue here for a ‘third way of memory’, to recognise how the entanglements between humans and machines both enable and endanger human agency in the making and the remixing of individual and collective memory. This includes the growth of AI agents, with increasing autonomy and infinite potential to make, remake, and repurpose individual and collective pasts, beyond human consent and control. This paper outlines two key developments of generative AI-driven services: firstly, they untether the human past from the present, producing a past that was never actually remembered in the first place, and, secondly, they usher in a new ‘conversational’ past through the dialogical construction of memory in the present. Ultimately, developments in generative AI are making it more difficult for us to recognise the human influence on, and pathways from, the past, and that human agency over remembering and forgetting is increasingly challenged.

This article is a commentary on the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), capitalism, and memory. The political policies of neoliberalism have reduced the capacity of individuals and groups to reflect on and change the social world, meanwhile applications of AI and algorithmic technologies, rooted in the profit-seeking objectives of global capitalism, deepen this deficit. In these conditions, memory in individuals and across society is at risk of becoming myopic. In this article, I develop the concept of myopic memory with two core claims. Firstly, I argue that AI is a technological development that cannot be divorced from the capitalist conditions from which it comes from and is implemented in service of. To this end, I reveal capitalism and colonialism's historical and contemporary use of surveillance as a way to control the populations it oppresses, imagining their pasts to determine their futures, disempowering them in the process. My second core claim emphasises that this process of disempowerment is undergoing an acute realisation four decades into the period of neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies have restructured society on the basis of being an individual consumer, leaving little time, space, and institutional capacity for citizens to reflect on their impact or challenge their dominance. As a result, with the growing role of AI and algorithmic technologies in shaping our engagement with society along similar lines of individualism, it is my conclusion that the scope of memory is being reduced and constrained within the prism of capitalism, reducing its potential, and rendering it myopic.