Have you ever thought about the information you deleted years ago, but suddenly that information appears in your search result while searching for anything about yourself?

That information can be anything, whether it is your social media post or an old photograph, or your old written blogs and articles and/or any personal details that you once shared publicly.

You may even have successfully asked Google to remove the result from Search. Yet the information may have already travelled somewhere else, including into datasets used to develop artificial intelligence.

This raises a question that the internet was not designed to answer: Can a person really be forgotten by a machine?

The idea sounds simple because human forgetting is simple, like we remove our photos from the album and think it goes from the album forever. Also, think about it: we delete a file, and it goes to the trash folder, and then it is permanently deleted. But artificial intelligence does not work like this. Once data has been used to train a machine learning model, its influence may be distributed across millions or billions of learned parameters.

This is where the traditional right to be forgotten meets one of the hardest problems in modern technology.

The Right to Be Forgotten Was Never About Erasing the Internet

In 2014, the Court of Justice of the European Union decided “The Right to be Forgotten”. This decision specified that people may ask the Google search engine to remove those links that show their name in certain cases. Article 17 of the General Data Protection Regulation later established a broader right to erasure, although that right is not absolute. Google itself explains that the right generally concerns removing certain search results, rather than deleting information from the entire internet.

That distinction matters even more in the age of generative AI.

Google has introduced a tool called “Results About You”. This tool lets people ask Google to remove their information from search results. The information includes things like addresses, phone numbers, and email addresses. Google made it clear that taking a result out of search does not mean the data is gone from the original website. The data stays where it was posted. 

So there are already two different questions: Can Google stop showing information about me? And can Google make its AI systems forget that information ever existed?

The second question is much harder.

Deleting Data Is Not the Same as Making AI Forget

A conventional database stores information in recognisable records. If a person’s record needs to be deleted, the system can locate that record and remove it.

An AI model is different.

During training, a model reads a lot of data.........

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