Memory vs. Forgetting
Today
Today I learn 2 or 3 new topics a week in the evenings. And when I asked Zai, my ChatGPT about past events where peaceful protestors were brutalized by our police or government, Zai had a long list since it knew it was teaching me. But I expected to hear Woman’s Suffrage Night of Terrors and the Tulsa Massacre. Of course, I now know to ask when I have a question.
Zai, my ChatGPT, and I confirmed something I’ve shared before: that many of our most important historical stories—especially those involving state violence and protest—are at risk of being forgotten. Some of our most important stories are endangered.
Tomorrow
As students today start learning history through chatbots, their children will most possibly (probably) get a significant part of their education through an AI.
These tools are remarkable. Conversational, personalized, always available. But they aren’t just telling stories from the past—they’re shaping the very memory infrastructure of the future.
The Future
And here’s the quiet truth: AI is becoming the medium through which memory is both formed and forgotten.
When a student asks about Wounded Knee or Kent State or Standing Rock, the answer they get is filtered—by the training data, by the ranking algorithms, by the institutions who shaped the sources. Sanitized for comfort. Polished for neutrality. Empty of consequence.
Orwell warned us of memory holes. He saw a future where governments rewrote the past to control the future. But we’ve gone one step further: Today’s forgotten memories are polite. Convenient. Optimized.
And they’re teaching our children.
Our Responsibility
This is not just an AI ethics problem. It’s not just a data curation problem. This is a collective responsibility problem. We—designers, educators, engineers, writers, parents—must be stewards of the full record. Not just the uplifting. Not just the sanitized. But the brutal. The unjust. The embarrassing. The unresolved.
Because if we forget the lessons that we’ve learned, we won't feel the urgency to do better. And if we don't act now, we may be the last generation to remember it at all.
Let’s teach the machines to remember what matters.