Psychologists explain how your brain can lie. Fruit of the Loom's logo never had a cornucopia and you didn't have pizza for dinner last Friday. False memories are more than just misremembering someone's name. Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. T-shirt tycoons Fruit of the Loom are both makers of functional, printable T-shirts and unintentional originators of a long-standing piece of memory misinformation.

Why do so many people think the Fruit of the Loom logo had a cornucopia? And while some people may laugh and move on, others spend years searching for an explanation. There is a shirt currently listed on eBay for $2,128.79. It was not designed by Versace or Dior, nor spun from the world's finest silk. In fact, a tag proudly declares, "100% cotton made in Myanmar"--but it's a second tag, just below that one, that makes this blue button-down so expensive. "I looked at it and I was like,," says Brooke Hermann, the 30-year-old Kentucky-based reseller who bought the top for $1 at a secondhand sale in 2024. "This doesn't look like any other Fruit of the Loom tag I've ever seen." Quick question: Does the Fruit of the Loom logo feature a cornucopia? Many of us have been wearing the casualwear company's T-shirts and underpants for decades, and yet the question of whether there is a woven brown horn of plenty on the logo is surprisingly contentious. According to a 2022 poll by the research company YouGov, 55% of Americans believe the logo does include a cornucopia, 25% are unsure, and only 21% are confident that it doesn't, even though this last group is correct.

On June 18, AI image-generation company Midjourney released a tool that lets users create short video clips using their own images as a template. Days later, Reddit cofounder Alexis Ohanian posted on X about how he used the tech to animate a photo of his late mother, which shows him as a child wrapped in her embrace. In the artificial video, she laughs and smiles before rocking him in her arms. "Damn, I wasn't ready for how this would feel," he wrote. "This is how she hugged me.

AI is increasingly used to enhance images and videos, both intentionally and unintentionally. As AI editing tools become more integrated into smartphones, users can modify or animate photos into realistic videos. This study examines the impact of AI-altered visuals on false memories--recollections of events that didn't occur or deviate from reality. In a pre-registered study, 200 participants were divided into four conditions of 50 each. Participants viewed original images, completed a filler task, then saw stimuli corresponding to their assigned condition: unedited images, AI-edited images, AI-generated videos, or AI-generated videos of AI-edited images. AI-edited visuals significantly increased false recollections, with AI-generated videos of AI-edited images having the strongest effect (2.05x compared to control). Confidence in false memories was also highest for this condition (1.19x compared to control). We discuss potential applications in HCI, such as therapeutic memory reframing, and challenges in ethical, legal, political, and societal domains.

More and more people are learning about the world through chatbots and the software's kin, whether they mean to or not. Google has rolled out generative AI to users of its search engine on at least four continents, placing AI-written responses above the usual list of links; as many as 1 billion people may encounter this feature by the end of the year. Meta's AI assistant has been integrated into Facebook, Messenger, WhatsApp, and Instagram, and is sometimes the default option when a user taps the search bar. And Apple is expected to integrate generative AI into Siri, Mail, Notes, and other apps this fall. Less than two years after ChatGPT's launch, bots are quickly becoming the default filters for the web.

This study examines the impact of AI on human false memories -- recollections of events that did not occur or deviate from actual occurrences. It explores false memory induction through suggestive questioning in Human-AI interactions, simulating crime witness interviews. Four conditions were tested: control, survey-based, pre-scripted chatbot, and generative chatbot using a large language model (LLM). Participants (N=200) watched a crime video, then interacted with their assigned AI interviewer or survey, answering questions including five misleading ones. False memories were assessed immediately and after one week. Results show the generative chatbot condition significantly increased false memory formation, inducing over 3 times more immediate false memories than the control and 1.7 times more than the survey method. 36.4% of users' responses to the generative chatbot were misled through the interaction. After one week, the number of false memories induced by generative chatbots remained constant. However, confidence in these false memories remained higher than the control after one week. Moderating factors were explored: users who were less familiar with chatbots but more familiar with AI technology, and more interested in crime investigations, were more susceptible to false memories. These findings highlight the potential risks of using advanced AI in sensitive contexts, like police interviews, emphasizing the need for ethical considerations.

The human brain is a complex, miraculous thing. As best we can tell, it's the epitome of biological evolution. But it doesn't come with any security software preinstalled. And that makes it ridiculously easy to hack. We like to imagine the human brain as a giant neural network that speaks its own language.

This is one of many questions that has plagued philosophers for thousands of years. In his 2003 paper Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?, the Swedish philosopher, futurist, Oxford professor and Director of the Future of Humanity Institute and Governance of AI Program Nick Bostrom covers several topics that underlay the possibility that life as we experience may indeed be "fake news": Substrate-Independence -- Consciousness is not necessarily a property born of biology and could be formed from other materials or even energy. Technological Limits of Computation -- Given our current rate of progress in computational power, memory storage and AI, it may be only a matter of decades before true artificial consciousness is created, leading to the era of "posthumanity". Therefore, when it saw that a human was about to make an observation of the microscopic world, it could fill in sufficient detail in the simulation in the appropriate domain on an as‐needed basis. If there were a substantial chance that our civilization will ever get to the posthuman stage and run many ancestor‐simulations, then how come you are not living in such a simulation?

The consequences of fabricated news stories may have lingering effects on your perception. According to a new study, voters may develop false memories after reading a fake news report. And, they're more likely to do so if the narrative lines up with their own beliefs. Researchers presented over 3,000 eligible voters in Ireland with legitimate and made-up stories ahead of the 2018 referendum on legalizing abortion. In subsequent questioning – and after being told that some of the reports were fake – nearly half of participants reported a memory for at least one of the fabricated events, and many tended to be steadfast in these beliefs.

And because of this fact, we're screwed. Due to advances in artificial intelligence, it's now possible to convincingly map anyone's face onto the body of another person in a video. As Vox's Aja Romano has explained, this technique is becoming more common in pornography: An actress's head can be mapped onto a porn actress's body. These "deepfakes" can be generated with free software, and they're different from the photoshopping of the past. This is live action -- and uncannily real. On Tuesday, BuzzFeed published a demonstration featuring the actor and director Jordan Peele.