Curating the Self Together: AI-Augmented Memory and the Disruption of Interpersonal Mnemonic Practices

Shared personal history is not a background condition of a relationship but a site at which relational agency is continuously exercised: a shared past is negotiated, not retrieved, through the joint reconstruction, contestation, and recession of what happened between us. AI-assisted memory systems – conversation transcripts mined by retrieval pipelines, background "dreaming" processes that consolidate selected traces into durable long-term memory – transform the mnemonic regime within which this joint work is possible. What is newly at stake is not who may read the record of a relationship but who helps write it. Drawing on work in progress with Carl Craver, the paper diagnoses three disruptions of relational agency. First, narrative asymmetry: when one partner brings reconstructive biological memory and the other brings biological memory plus a semantically searchable archive, the relationship becomes structurally unequal in ways neither party has chosen. Second, mnemonic gaslighting: the discrediting of another's lived recollection by appeal to logs and system-generated summaries whose authority is doubly unearned – opaque and falsely neutral in framing, yet resting on archives that are themselves selectively ranked and, as recent security research shows, quietly corruptible. Third, the erosion of co-forgetting – the tacit achievement by which foolish remarks, earlier selves, and unresolved episodes are permitted to recede enough for trust, repair, and transformation to remain possible – now that defection has become cheap, unilateral, and silent. Against these pressures the paper defends mnemonic solidarity: a regime-level response that distinguishes capture from consolidation, insists on contestable provenance, and treats the conditions of shared mnemonic life as public goods owed reciprocally among fragile, partial, revisable rememberers – including those who never adopted the technology but must live within the regime it installs.

Part of panel Disruptive Technology and Relational Agency: Therapy, Intimacy, Memory, Trust, and Individualization - part 2