AI fakes muddy history waters

Paris – 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.

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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.