In a blog post that I wrote back in 2021, I asked this question, “In generations to come, how will you be remembered? Will it be the anecdotes passed on by relatives, or will you leave a detailed and coherent portrait of the way you want to be remembered?”

It is amazing to me that a little over three years later I could update it like this,

“In generations to come, how will you be remembered? Will you leave a detailed and coherent portrait of the way you want to be remembered, or will you allow AI to create a passable facsimile of you that mimics your personal characteristics, speaks with your voice and shapes everyone’s memory of you?”

There’s a classic Sci-Fi movie called “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” where aliens take over the bodies of humans. AI is going to do just that to the memory of you – unless you take action.

There is a massive global industry building around the digital afterlife, and a lot of it is focused on grief. People who have lost loved ones are turning to AI for solace in dealing with their loss and start-up companies are feeding them with AI-generated comfort by recreating their dead friends and family with chat, voice, video and virtual reality options.

Whether it is a good thing for people to be dealing with grief in this way is debatable, but one thing is for sure, the memory of the person who has died is now being shaped by an AI bot that creates new memories.

As AI continues to emerge, the gap between how you want to be remembered and how you will be remembered is growing wider and wider. When I started work on the idea behind folios, my focus was entirely on creating personal life stories and an infrastructure that would allow them to persist into the future.

I gave a lot of thought to how to capture the memories and of all of the changes that would be necessary to happen to persist that data into the future. I never gave any thought to the need to defend them from the insidious creep of AI. Yet that is where I find myself.

If you wanted to create a perfect AI representation of yourself, there is no doubt that having a life story available in folio format would be perfect training data. Everything that we could include in a folio can be interpreted by AI.

However, when you create and publish a folio, the output is encrypted and can only be read by FolioPlayer, so there is already a barrier to folios being used by AI as training data.

And that is the way we intend to keep it. If you want to leave that coherent portrait of yourself that is untainted by AI, then a folio is still the way to go.