Auschwitz museum warns against fake AI images of victims

The Auschwitz museum warns 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,” says 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 tells AFP.

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

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

“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,” says Sawicki.

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