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.”

  • @militaryintelligence
    12•2 months ago

    By design. Cloud history, question if what we are seeing is real, control the narrative

    • Flying Squid
      7•2 months 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.

  • @[email protected]
    8•2 months ago

    I can already hear tankies in the distance claiming that a certain event at a certain square was ai generated

  • @gmtom
    2•2 months ago

    The sooner we begin the butlerian jihad the better.