A wave of touching photos showing great moments in time is fascinating amateur historians online. The problem? They are not real -- and may be clouding our view of the past.

Widely shared on social media, the atmospheric black and white shots – a mother and her child starving in the Great Depression; an exhausted soldier in the Vietnam war – may look at first like real historic documents.

But they were created by artificial intelligence, and researchers fear they are muddying the waters of real history.

“AI has caused a tsunami of fake history, especially images,” said Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, a Dutch historian who debunks false claims online.

“In some cases, they even make an AI version of a real old photo. It is really weird, especially when the original is very famous.”

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.world
      7·
      19 hours ago

      I suppose, but some of these don’t make any sense at all, not even from that standpoint, because it requires people to know what two specific historical figures looked like before they saw the AI picture and it doesn’t actually change anything about actual history if they don’t know it’s not them:

      “In some cases, they even make an AI version of a real old photo. It is really weird, especially when the original is very famous.”

      One photo shared on Facebook shows a pair of fresh-faced young men posing in front of an antique biplane: purportedly Orville and Wilbur Wright at the time of their first powered flight.

      But those are not the Wright Brothers.

      Real archive shots from the time show mustachioed Orville and his taller brother Wilbur in flat caps, looking nothing like the blond pair in the sepia-hued AI image.

      The point of that seems to be to just do it for the sake of doing it as far as I can tell.