{"id":613172,"date":"2026-09-27T07:38:21","date_gmt":"2026-09-27T07:38:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/613172\/"},"modified":"2026-09-27T07:38:21","modified_gmt":"2026-09-27T07:38:21","slug":"i-have-nearly-20000-photos-on-my-phone-and-now-ai-knows-the-story-of-my-life-what-does-it-all-mean-asks-sachin-kureishi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/613172\/","title":{"rendered":"I have nearly 20,000 photos on my phone – and now AI knows the story of my life. What does it all mean, asks\u00a0Sachin Kureishi"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been disputing a parking ticket with a local council since November 2024. The case is finally getting juicy. I will be self- representing at a tribunal, which fills me with an enormous sense of pride. I\u2019m not doing this for myself, I\u2019m doing this for the fined, the forgotten and the falsely accused everywhere. I\u2019m doing this for you, dear reader. And because I\u2019m not paying \u00a3180.<\/p>\n

I could give you the whole back story, but the facts are simple: I parked, tried to pay, but technology failed me. There were no ticket machines and the app broke at a critical moment. Fortunately, I had the presence of mind to photograph and screenshot all of it.<\/p>\n

I think I have a good chance in court. A blurry picture of a street corner, timestamped exactly two minutes before the ticket was issued, is proof I was in the area trying my honest best, that I was not the reckless abandoner of vehicles they have taken me for.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve been thinking about pictures a lot this week. Namely, the thousands of images we take on our phones that have been accumulating for years.<\/p>\n

At the Apple conference in June, they unveiled the new AI-enhanced Siri that can cross-reference between your photos, messages and emails, and make sense of what it finds. You could ask it to \u2018find memories with Mum\u2019, for instance, or to archive photos of an ex. The software was rolled out in the UK this month \u2013 and will come ready-installed in the new iPhone<\/a> Duo, Apple\u2019s \u00a32,000 flip phone launching in October. It arrives at a time of such moral panic about our phones that when former PM Keir Starmer<\/a> announced age restrictions on social media, it was met with the kind of unanimous approval he didn\u2019t manage on anything else. Phones are not popular these days, but if we all wake up tomorrow and they are gone, I suspect we would mourn the loss of our photographs more than anything else.<\/p>\n

\"\" <\/p>\n

On my own iPhone 17 Pro I have nearly 20,000 photos and videos, stretching back 16 years. Most of them unremarkable. Many of them blurry. All of them, in some sense, true.<\/p>\n

We swipe back and years compress. Parties, holidays, meals and receipts. Our feet in the sand. A plant we were in the process of killing. A person we used to love and the view from a train. Dozens of dry-cleaning tickets. And a single photograph of a street corner that ends up being the key piece of evidence in a high-stakes legal dispute.<\/p>\n

Our photo archive is like a museum, but something closer to evidence \u2013 it\u2019s the most complete record of our inner lives. There\u2019s a reason we don\u2019t often photograph the sofa, or the kitchen at 7pm on a Wednesday, or the pile of post behind the front door. And yet sometimes we do, and those are the photographs that decades later might give us pause. Because the sofa is gone. The kitchen was in a flat we left. That person standing there, among that particular arrangement of furniture, is a version of life that no longer exists.<\/p>\n

I love the geographical view \u2013 the map of the world, every photo you\u2019ve ever taken pinned to the precise spot you took it. I like the Memories too: short, scored, algorithmically generated films that surface at exactly the wrong moment \u2013 a bittersweet video of an ex appearing mid-first-date; an important work meeting violently derailed by a Memory of your late hamster.<\/p>\n

This technology has been around for ten years. Search a friend\u2019s name, or \u2018birthday cake\u2019, and every picture you\u2019ve taken of them appears. But try something more abstract, like \u2018goodbye\u2019, and the results become more interesting. Loved ones waving from airport queues. Suitcases and empty houses. I type \u2018waiting\u2019 and I\u2019ve got bus stops and the scrum outside a festival urinal. \u2018Break-up\u2019 and I\u2019m handed a selfie of myself and an ex-girlfriend, miserable after<\/p>\n

a massive fight outside an Indian takeaway. \u2018Nostalgia\u2019 returns me family photos from 30 years ago, New Year\u2019s fireworks and karaoke in Japan. And one of my dad, who had an accident a few years ago that left him tetraplegic, throwing a ball for my dog in the park.<\/p>\n

YOUR SIRI AI NEED-TO-KNOW\u00a0 <\/p>\n

What is it? A new artificial-intelligence enhanced version of Apple\u2019s Siri voice assistant, launched earlier this month.<\/p>\n

What do you need? An iPhone that can run iOS 27. You\u2019ll be notified when an upgrade to iOS 27 is ready, or you can go to Settings on iOS, tap General, then Software Update to see if it\u2019s available. Some of the more advanced Siri features are only available on the newer models of iPhone (eg the iPhone 18).<\/p>\n

What can it do? Siri can now trawl through all your WhatsApp messages, emails and photos simultaneously to find a certain image or create themed galleries (featuring a person or location). You can then, for example, tell it to \u2018send a photo of X at the beach to Y\u2019.<\/p>\n

<!- – ad: https:\/\/mads.dailymail.co.uk\/v8\/us\/lifestyle\/none\/article\/other\/mpu_factbox.html?id=mpu_factbox_1 – ->\n<\/p>\n

It\u2019s like standing in front of an abstract painting. The curation feels, at times, entirely random, and yet the mind goes searching for meaning \u2013 and what it finds is sometimes profound, because you\u2019re the only person with the context to make sense of it. And with this new Siri update, our lives will be narrated back to us in ways even more extraordinary, uncanny and unsettling.<\/p>\n

The same intelligence that can find a photo of \u2018goodbye\u2019 will understand the grammar of a relationship. By cross-referencing your emails and messages, it knows exactly how often you interact with someone, in what places and at what time of day. And it notices when someone simply stops appearing. It recognises patterns you might miss: ageing, complexion and weight fluctuations. It may know you are depressed before you do, that something is physically wrong. This is both a profound gift and a profound intrusion.<\/p>\n

Human memory is fundamentally a forgetting machine. It retains the outline and discards a lot of the detail. Our phone\u2019s camera roll, interpreted by AI, will invert this. If we keep taking photos, nothing will be lost. Every face at every party, every meal, every street, organised into chapters, characters and footnotes \u2013 the great epic of our lives, the director\u2019s cut, available on demand.<\/p>\n

The question of what forgetting does for us psychologically \u2013 and what happens when we no longer have to \u2013 is something no one can answer yet. And there will always be questions around privacy: who owns our data; children being born into a digital archive they didn\u2019t consent to.<\/p>\n

But I find myself going headlong into it all anyway. I photograph everything now, with particular interest in the mundane. My family having a drink in the garden. My girlfriend packing her bag for work. My golden retriever dragging me to the same park for the second time in a day. In five, ten, 20 years, these will be the touchstones, how we\u2019ll remember who we were. It\u2019s another reason, for better or worse, why we\u2019ll never give up our phones.<\/p>\n

For now, there is a tribunal to prepare for. I\u2019ll be attending armed with my photographs and screenshots. It is, I\u2019m aware, a parking ticket. But given the high-profile nature of the case, I cannot rule out that powerful forces may prefer I didn\u2019t make it to court. So please, dear reader, consider this: if anything should happen to me, my phone contains the full picture, the whole unremarkable, occasionally magnificent record of a life. It will tell you everything you need to know.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I have been disputing a parking ticket with a local council since November 2024. The case is finally…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":613173,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[365,363,364,557,263,111,139,69,145,72681],"class_list":["post-613172","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-dailymail","tag-lifestyle","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-technology","tag-you-mag"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=613172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/613172\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/613173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=613172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=613172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=613172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}