In this paper, the authors engaged in a structured exploration based on their personal experiences and professional expertise. Together they examine how AI impacts personal and collective memory, preservation efforts, and the ethical concerns around personal archives. As GenAI becomes more accessible to anyone with digital online access, new questions arise about the authenticity, continuity, and transformation of our documents. The questions we asked of ourselves and each other are: How has AI changed our understanding of the authenticity of the documents in our personal and family archives? Do AI-generated narratives and images enhance or distort our family and collective memories? At the core of our exploration is our concern about the authenticity and sustainability of family memory in the digital age. While focusing on how AI-generated images and narratives can affect intergenerational knowledge transfer, specifically how different generations approach personal documentation and memory work, and what role AI plays (if any) in shaping these approaches, especially in light of creating, maintaining, or accessing personal and family archives, for “private memory traces inside human brains are prosthetically augmented by publicly accessible documents and associated document technologies” (Rivera, 2021). Drawing on the work of Schmidt and Muehlfeld (2017) on intergenerational knowledge transfer and the preservation versus transformation dilemma (Lischer-Katz, 2022), the authors further examine how AI technologies impact documentation, while also considering ethical dilemmas of authenticity, bias, and ownership in AI-mediated archival practices (Hanna et al., 2024).
Reyes et al. (Mon,) studied this question.
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