Early in December, DIGSUM researcher Samuel Merrill took part in a panel discussion on Technology, Memory and Ethics alongside Rik Smit and Yael Richler Friedman and moderated by Martin Winstone. The panel was part of an event hosted in London by the UK Government in its role as president of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. The event also included talks by Professor Victoria Grace Richardson-Walden, Noah Kravitz, Danny Morris, Shiran Mlamdovsky Somech, and Clementine Smith. During the panel in Lancaster House on The Mall, which was dedicated to AI in the Holocaust Education, Research and Remembrance Sector, Sam drew on some of the research he has conducted with fellow panellist Rik Smit (University of Groningen) and Thomas Smits (University of Amsterdam) within his TAIGA micro-project on Artificial Intelligence and Social Memory.
The main outcome of that project – an open access article entitled “Stochastic Remembering and Distributed Mnemonic Agency: Recalling Twentieth Century Activists with ChatGPT” – was recently published in a special issue of the Memory Studies Review dedicated to AI and Collective Memory.