The Download: generating AI memories, and China's softening tech regulation

As a six-year-old growing up in Barcelona, Spain, during the 1940s, Maria would visit a neighbor's apartment in her building when she wanted to see her father. From there, she could try and try to catch a glimpse of him in the prison below, where he was locked up for opposing the dictatorship of Francisco Franco. There is no photo of Maria on that balcony. But she can now hold something like it: a fake photo--or memory-based reconstruction, as the Barcelona-based design studio Domestic Data Streamers puts it--of the scene that a real photo might have captured.The studio uses generative image models, such as OpenAI's DALL-E, to bring people's memories to life. The fake snapshots are blurred and distorted, but they can still rewind a lifetime in an instant.