Romane took out a photo of me at twenty and placed it next to her grandfather.
"Because you make the same face when you're tired."
I'd gotten out the box of photos to pass the time on a rainy Sunday afternoon. I hadn't planned to explain anything about artificial intelligence.
What AI does with its memories
An AI doesn't store its memories in the order it learned them. It connects them by resemblance. A photo of a cat gets placed near another photo of a cat — not because they were seen on the same day, but because they share shapes, textures, outlines.
In technical terms, these are called embeddings: each memory becomes a point in a space, and nearby points look alike. But what matters is that the closeness doesn't depend on time. It depends on content.
That's very different from how you organize photos in an album.
The activity
You need a box of old photos. Printed ones are best — you can handle them, flip them over, move them around. And a large surface.
The starting instruction is simple: "Group the photos that go together."
No other rules. Don't say "by year" or "by person." Let the kids decide what "goes together."
Then, when the groups are formed, ask: "Why did you put those together?"
That's when it gets interesting. Because the criteria come out on their own: blurry photos together, outdoor photos together, photos with food in them, photos where people are really smiling. Romane created a "sad photos" category (which only contained photos where people looked serious, not sad — but that was her word).
Second step: "Now do the same thing, but without looking at who's in the photo. Just colors and shapes."
That's when the sorting completely changes. People who have nothing to do with each other end up together because their sweaters are the same color. Family scenes fall apart and regroup because they share the same summer light.
What actually happened
Romane spent twenty minutes refining her groups. She'd move a photo, put it back, move it again. At one point she held two photos side by side (one of her grandmother as a young woman, one of herself at roughly the same age) and said: "They look alike but it's not the same person."
I explained that an AI might have made the same hesitation. That it would have spotted similarities and placed the two photos close together, without knowing they were different people. That's why it also gets taught who is who — not just how things look alike.
She nodded knowingly, as if filing that away for later.
Meryl had noticed something. He was collecting photos that had red in them (a tablecloth, a sweater, a ball) and stacking them up. His criterion was visual, immediate, without looking further. When his pile was big enough, he slipped the whole thing into his shirt to keep. We only found them that evening.
To finish
The box stayed on the table until nighttime.
Does an AI, when it connects two memories, feel something like what Romane felt holding those two photos?
Probably not. But it makes the same gesture.