AI images of Holocaust victims

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The Auschwitz museum warned on Friday against Facebook posts with “harmful” AI-generated fictional images of victims of the Nazi German death camp, condemning them for “falsifying history.”

The museum at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp has long used its own social media accounts to publish authentic victim photos, names and information to raise Holocaust awareness.

Now the museum has discovered that at least a couple of Facebook pages were producing similar victim bios but with fictional information or photos.

People have started to notice that there are pages, including one called ’90’s History’ where there are short bios of the victims as well as photos that were clearly made by artificial intelligence,” said museum deputy spokesman Pawel Sawicki.

“Producing artificial images of real people, or what is even more troubling, producing false identities of victims, is certainly troubling and also very harmful for the memory of those who died at Auschwitz,” he told AFP.

Such posts were harmful because “producing artificial information, last names, is falsifying history,” said Sawicki.

This sort of disinformation could even lead to Holocaust denial, he added.

“There is, of course, a danger that if we have these fake people, then perhaps someone could claim that the whole thing is made up,” said Sawicki.

He said the museum was in touch with US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook, in the hopes that it could look into the matter.

While AI has been embraced in recent years as a tool by museums, educators, and researchers to teach about the Holocaust and collect data, concerns have also been rising for years over how AI could be used to distort historical accuracy.

In 2024 UNESCO published a report in partnership with the World Jewish Congress warning that AI could result in false and misleading claims about the Holocaust spreading online, either because of flaws in the programs or because hate groups and Holocaust deniers will intentionally use AI programs to generate content that falsely calls into question the murder of Jews and other groups by the Nazis.

One of the biggest concerns expressed in the report was that AI could be used to create so-called deepfakes of the Holocaust – realistic images or videos that could be used to suggest the Holocaust didn’t happen or was exaggerated, which could lead to greater antisemitism.