A wave of touching photos showing great moments in time is fascinating amateur historians online. The problem? They are not real — and might be clouding our view of the past.
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 — might look at first like historic documents.
However, they were created by artificial intelligence (AI), and researchers fear they are muddying the waters of real history.
Photo: Reuters
“AI has caused a tsunami of fake history, especially images,” said Jo Hedwig Teamwise, 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,” Teeuwisse said.
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.
However, 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.
Among the images created using Midjourney, a popular AI online image generator, is a series of fake reproductions portraying the moment when the suspected assassin of former US president John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was shot dead by Jack Ruby in 1963.
Other images on Midjourney purport to show the explosion of the atom bomb over Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945, the invasion of Prague by Soviet-allied troops in 1968 and even a vision of the Roman Colosseum in ancient times.
“They often focus on events from too long ago to have been photographed or on moments that are poorly documented,” said Marina Amaral, an artist who specializes in adding color to black and white photographs.
“This creates a risk of false visuals being accepted as fact, which could, over time, distort our understanding of history and weaken public trust in visual evidence as a reliable source for learning about the past,” Amaral said.
For now, Amaral and Teeuwissen believe they can still tell fake historical images from real ones just by looking at them.
AI-generated photos often have tell-tale glitches: too many fingers on a hand, missing details — such as the lack of a propeller on the Wright brothers’ plane — or, on the other hand, compositions that are too perfect.
“AI-generated pictures can recreate the look, but they miss the human element, the intent, the reason behind the photographer’s choices,” Amaral said. “They may be visually convincing, but they’re ultimately hollow.”
For Teeuwissen, “real photos are made by real people and there’s usually something that’s out of focus, or someone looks silly by accident, the makeup looks bad, et cetera.”
However, she judges it is “only a matter of time” before the quality of the AI image makes fakes hard to detect with the naked eye — a “dangerous” prospect, she said, which would amplify disinformation.
NO EXCUSES: Marcos said his administration was acting on voters’ demands, but an academic said the move was emotionally motivated after a poor midterm showing Philippine President Ferdinand Marcos Jr yesterday sought the resignation of all his Cabinet secretaries, in a move seen as an attempt to reset the political agenda and assert his authority over the second half of his single six-year term. The order came after the president’s allies failed to win a majority of Senate seats contested in the 12 polls on Monday last week, leaving Marcos facing a divided political and legislative landscape that could thwart his attempts to have an ally succeed him in 2028. “He’s talking to the people, trying to salvage whatever political capital he has left. I think it’s
Polish presidential candidates offered different visions of Poland and its relations with Ukraine in a televised debate ahead of next week’s run-off, which remains on a knife-edge. During a head-to-head debate lasting two hours, centrist Warsaw Mayor Rafal Trzaskowski, from Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk’s governing pro-European coalition, faced the Eurosceptic historian Karol Nawrocki, backed by the right-wing populist Law and Justice party (PiS). The two candidates, who qualified for the second round after coming in the top two places in the first vote on Sunday last week, clashed over Poland’s relations with Ukraine, EU policy and the track records of their
UNSCHEDULED VISIT: ‘It’s a very bulky new neighbor, but it will soon go away,’ said Johan Helberg of the 135m container ship that run aground near his house A man in Norway awoke early on Thursday to discover a huge container ship had run aground a stone’s throw from his fjord-side house — and he had slept through the commotion. For an as-yet unknown reason, the 135m NCL Salten sailed up onto shore just meters from Johan Helberg’s house in a fjord near Trondheim in central Norway. Helberg only discovered the unexpected visitor when a panicked neighbor who had rung his doorbell repeatedly to no avail gave up and called him on the phone. “The doorbell rang at a time of day when I don’t like to open,” Helberg told television
A team of doctors and vets in Pakistan has developed a novel treatment for a pair of elephants with tuberculosis (TB) that involves feeding them at least 400 pills a day. The jumbo effort at the Karachi Safari Park involves administering the tablets — the same as those used to treat TB in humans — hidden inside food ranging from apples and bananas, to Pakistani sweets. The amount of medication is adjusted to account for the weight of the 4,000kg elephants. However, it has taken Madhubala and Malika several weeks to settle into the treatment after spitting out the first few doses they
RSS