Name: Will AI Images Change Our Memories?
Uploaded: 2026-01-17T16:54:44.000Z
Duration: 6 min 42 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Of course we want you to do more than just search photos.

We also want to help you make them better.

AI advancements give us more powerful ways to do this.

Using a combination of semantic understanding and generative AI.

You can do much more with a new experience called Magic Editor.

Let's have a look at the most recent Google Developer Conference, CEO Sundar Pichai announced a new tool for Google Photos called Magic Editor.

The tool goes beyond simple color correction, even beyond erasing unwanted people in the background.

With Magic Editor, you can make fundamental changes to the photos you've taken using artificial intelligence.

Around that same time, Adobe released a new tool for Photoshop called Generative Fill.

For example, here's a photo that my wife took of me in Scotland last year with our dog Titus, next to the lovely stone cottage that we stayed at for a couple of nights.

Except the photo she took isn't really this big.

I used Generative Fill to extend it out in all directions and it did so seamlessly.

And also, we didn't actually stay in a stone cottage.

And my boots were green With Generative Fill and Magic Editor it's true what the late Thanos once said.

During the Google event, Marques Brownlee of MKBHD tweeted simply, what is a photo?

At one time, we thought of photography as a way to capture accurate representations of the world, a way to freeze time in snapshots that we could revisit to see what things what we looked like in the past.

With the arrival of camera phones and Instagram, simple editing tools and filters of all kinds, photography became less about the past and more about the present, a tool to to present your preferred glamorized self to others and ultimately to yourself.

You know, something Pichai said at that Google event has really stuck with me.

And maybe you want to even get rid of some clouds to make it feel as sunny as you remember it.

There's so much going on in that sentence, it recognizes something universally true about human memory.

It is always necessarily the case that memory distorts the past according to the needs of the present.

Human beings are constantly making a narrative of their lives, writing and rewriting the story of who they are.

Memories are cherry picked and altered to fit the current narrative.

Remembering a cloudy day as sunny is the least of the changes we make.

This is by and large a healthy process and the only way to forge a coherent, continuous sense of self.

There is a truth about the past that exists independently of our recollection of it.

Part of photography's function is to preserve that truth, to put down anchors in the past and prevent our minds from drifting too far from what actually happened.

Tools like Magic Editor loosen those anchors.

They put the power of professional Photoshop artists into the hands of everyone, to be deployed with the ease of a click.

Now, maybe all this doesn't really, really matter.

Maybe a sky changed here and a person erased there doesn't amount to a radical change of the past.

Or maybe it finally forces us to face another that photographs were never really accurate representations of the world to begin with.

Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, wrote the great Susan Sontag, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are, or memory, for that matter.

The act of choosing where the frame ends is an act of distortion.

Now, does this mean there is nothing real about photos?

Memories select for moments of heightened emotion.

What you determined was worth seeing at the time, neither give the whole picture.

These new AI tools and all the ones to come allow us to be more selective with our photos.

In using them, countless tiny truths will be lost forever.

Will it alter the record we leave to future generations?

But of course, memory is constantly changing, and

the past is is always only what we want it to be.

Hey everybody, thank you so much for watching.

I just wanted to let you know that the paperback of my book of essays, Escape Into Meaning, is going to be out in just over 10 days on July 11th.

And here is the COVID which I absolutely love.

You know, I wrote this book to be thought provoking, but

I also wanted it to be fun and friendly, something that you could read on the beach in the summer, for example.

And I think this cover really captures that.

So shout out to James Iacobelli, the designer, for the amazing work.

And thank you to everybody who's already read, rated and reviewed the book on Amazon or Goodreads.

You can find the link for the book, the paperback, which is, by the way, about 10 bucks cheaper than the hardcover in the description below.

Thank you again and I'll see you guys next time.

This episode was brought to you by Squarespace.

If you don't know, Squarespace is the all in one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online.

Whether you're just starting out or managing a growing brand, Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and

sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place, all on your terms.

Their templates are flexible, their blogging tools are easy to use, and

Squarespace provides you with all the analytics you need to iterate and grow your business.

Head over to squarespace.com for a free trial, and

when you're ready to Launch, go to squarespace.com nerdwriter for 10% off your first purchase.

Thanks, guys, and I'll see you next time.