Clickbait and 'AI slop' distorting memory of the Holocaust

An emaciated and apparently blind man stands in the snow at the Nazi concentration camp of Flossenbuerg: the image seems real at first but is part of a wave of AI-generated content about the Holocaust.

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As the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day yesterday, experts warn that such content - whether produced as clickbait for commercial gain, or for political motives - threatens efforts to preserve the memory of Nazi crimes.

AFP's Fact Check team has noted a surge of such imagery on social networks, distorting the history of Nazi Germany's murder of six million European Jews during World War II.

Among the AI-generated images that have gone viral is one of a little girl with curly hair on a tricycle.

She is presented as Hannelore Kaufmann, a 13-year-old Berliner who purportedly died at the Auschwitz extermination camp, of which the 1945 liberation by Soviet troops was commemorated yesterday. However, there is no record of her ever having existed.