Project Update
20 mins Sloan Project update.
Paul Smart The Story of Your Life: Large Language Models and Personal Memory:
This presentation explores how large language models (LLMs) are transforming the landscape of personal memory. Whereas traditional lifelogging technologies merely capture and store data, LLMs actively participate in remembering through interpretation, dialogue, and narrative generation.
Drawing on advances in multimodal modelling, retrieval-augmented generation, and tool use, I examine how these systems support new forms of encoding, elaboration, and retrieval—facilitating both factual recall and the co-creation of autobiographical narratives. In doing so, LLMs not only preserve lived experience but reshape it into evolving life stories, contributing to what has been described as narrative niche construction. More broadly, the talk considers how these systems are altering the ecology of text itself—shifting from static inscription to dynamic, co-authored narrative—and asks how our future memories, and perhaps our future selves, will be written in collaboration with machines.