Artificial intelligence changes how the right to be forgotten works
Prefigured forgetting. Memory, the right to be forgotten and artificial intelligence
Computers and Society
Summary
The right to be forgotten lets people erase personal information from the internet, but this idea was made when online data was stored like files or search results. The authors explain that AI now creates new kinds of digital memories by guessing and regenerating information instead of keeping fixed records. This changes how forgetting works because you can’t just delete a record anymore. So, the right to be forgotten needs to be designed into AI systems and laws from the start, not just applied after the fact.
What this means in practice
- •For privacy policy makers: Design legal and ethical frameworks that handle AI-generated personal data beyond traditional records.
- •For ai ethics teams: Develop AI systems incorporating forgetting mechanisms aligned with rights changes in digital memory regimes.
A survey. It maps existing work.
Authors
Pompeu Casanovas
Abstract
This inaugural keynote lecture surveys the state of the art of the right to be forgotten and examines how it is being transformed by artificial intelligence. Drawing on cognitive science, philosophy and the social sciences, it treats forgetting as a constitutive function of memory, and recalls that remembering the past and imagining the future share the same mechanism. It then reviews the origins, the European and national case law, and the paradoxes of the right, and offers a periodisation of the specialised literature between 2009 and 2026. The core claim is that digital memory has moved through three regimes, archive, search engine and generative model, and that the right was designed for the first two. In the third, personal information is no longer stored as a locatable record but inferred and regenerated. Artificial intelligence prefigures the frameworks of individual and collective remembering. The right to be forgotten thus ceases to be merely an individual ex post remedy and becomes a property to be designed and governed within legal and ethical ecosystems along the artificial intelligence value chain.