Where Memory Ends and Generative AI Begins

In late March, a well-funded artificial intelligence startup hosted what it said was the first ever AI film festival at the Alamo Drafthouse theater in San Francisco. It’s a question for the AI era, where our holy photos merge with holey memories, where new pixels are generated whole cloth by artificial intelligence. Now the company is testing Magic Editor, a feature on select Android phones that repositions subjects, removes photobombers, and edits out other unseemly elements, then uses generative AI to fill in pixel gaps. Adobe is calling it a “co-pilot” for creative workflows, which parrots the phrasing that other tech companies, such as Microsoft, are using to describe generative AI apps.