Memorials call on social media operators to take action against AI fakes. There is a problem with historical photos.
The images are heartbreaking. An American soldier carries two small children in striped concentration camp clothing from Buchenwald to freedom. A young woman plays a violin in the Auschwitz extermination camp. There are photos of the alleged reunion between prisoners and liberators or fictional scenes of crying children behind barbed wire. A picture shows 14-year-old Czesława Kwoka in Auschwitz. The Polish girl was actually imprisoned and murdered there. However, the counterfeiters converted a historical black and white image of her into a color photo. Her facial injuries were retouched.
Photos of this kind are currently flooding so-called social media. They are manufactured with little effort using artificial intelligence. Content farms around the world produce such history-falsifying content with the most emotional content possible, says Gina Wiedemann from the Arolsen Archives The world’s largest database of abducted victims of the Nazis. Your goal: generate clicks and earn money with them. In addition, there are apparently right-wing radical circles that spread their revisionist theses.
Now around 40 German Nazi memorials and documentation centers are demanding in an open letter published on Tuesday from the operating companies such as Instagram or Tiktok to draw conclusions. The development is viewed “with great concern,” it says. Life stories are “instrumentalized for profit” and history is falsified and kitschified.
The memorials demand that AI-generated images must be labeled by social media operators. Content that falsifies history and is misleading must be reported as misinformation. The companies should take proactive action against this history-falsifying AI content and cooperate with memorial sites “to improve detection systems for Holocaust-related misinformation,” it continues.
Andreas Ehresmann from the Sandbostel Memorial in Lower Saxony provided the impetus for the initiative. Around six weeks ago, very emotional images that allegedly came from Sandbostel were noticed for the first time in the memorial. You can see US soldiers freeing prisoners. Another soldier is carrying a prisoner in his arms, Ehresmann tells taz. The photos conveyed a grain of truth, but they were fakes. Sandbostel was liberated in 1945 not by American soldiers, but by British soldiers.
Uwe Neumärker from the Berlin Monument Foundation fears that the AI falsifications of Holocaust scenes are just the beginning. “We will soon have problems with historical photos,” he tells the taz. If it is no longer possible to distinguish between historical documents and AI-generated forgeries, there is a risk that the authenticity of real memories will be called into question. Therefore, labeling the AI images is a “minimum requirement,” according to the director of the Monument Foundation.
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