AI platforms can create images that might look they are historical photos. This could be a problem:

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 — may look at first like real historic documents.

But they were created by artificial intelligence, and researchers fear they are muddying the waters of real history…

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,” said Amaral.

With AI text and images, history could be all redone. What is available online, often the first or primary source for many, could provide different historical accounts and evidence.

Of course, history to some degree is always in flux as different actors and different contexts affect how we understand what happened in the past. There are things that happened and then perceptions and interpretations of those happenings that often take time to develop and solidify. AI joins an already existing process.

Do AI images then pose a unique threat to historical knowledge and narratives? If history is primarily created and understood through images online, perhaps. Will others find ways to demonstrate that certain images are truly from the past?