Theresa Präauer on AI-Generated Past Lives and Social Media Nostalgia

In her Süddeutsche Zeitung column, Theresa Präauer examines a social media trend of fabricated personal histories. Users are generating invented pasts with artificial intelligence, and the results fill feeds with alternate versions of themselves. Präauer frames the phenomenon with a wry question about collective memory: were we not all make-up artists in 1968? The appeal, she suggests, lies in entertainment value. Nothing currently seems as amusing as manufacturing the memories one would have preferred to have. The column treats these AI-produced pasts as a cultural curiosity rather than a technical development, focusing on the appetite for desirable recollection. Präauer's piece appears under the Social Media rubric of the Munich-based daily.