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.

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.

With an average open email rate of 18.0% in 2020, it's not like marketing teams are crushing this email thing. Wait, isn't 18% pretty good? We get that standards are low here, for sure. About four billion people have an inbox. It's a tough sell to abandon that marketing strategy.

Rachel Aviv describes the way Elizabeth Loftus's psychology research has established the fallibility of personal memory, and shows how her testimony in court has helped to exculpate innocent defendants ("Past Imperfect," April 5th). The fact that there is limited experimental evidence for the emergence of memories of trauma long after it occurs does not prove that such memories are a fiction, of course. The malleability of memory, which Loftus's research has demonstrated, suggests that it is just as likely that memories can be forgotten and later remembered as it is that they can be implanted or distorted. In Aviv's account, Loftus's repudiation of unconscious repressed memories comes across as motivated as much by personal bias as by anything else. When Aviv astutely notes that it's "hard to avoid the thought" that Loftus's career was "shaped by the slipperiness of [the] foundational memory" of her mother's tragic death, Loftus vehemently denies it.

"I tried to stay with some of the things that I know will be happening because we have some control of them," said Mr. Vogels. On Wednesday, he shared eight predictions based on customer-behavior patterns and technology investments by the company. The cloud will be everywhere. Next year will see more devices and more organizations powered by the cloud. Mr. Vogel, whose expertise in scalable systems led him to Amazon.com in 2004, predicts that the cloud in 2021 will continue to move beyond the traditional notion of a centralized system, with troves of data moving back and forth between customers and massive data centers in real time.

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.

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