'Amateur and dangerous': Historians weigh in on viral AI history videos

>I strive for accuracy

Well that's plainly not true. Striving for accuracy is going through the script and doing this thing called "fact checking". It's an actual job that used to mean something to writers, journalists, documentarians...

The noble goal of egalitarian democratization of media has had the unintended consequence of completely blurring the lines between quality and ... non-quality information. What galls me most is the people who care about fact and truth, and used to be the guardians or advocates for such things, are just drowned in a sea of bots, malicious actors, and the ignorant and are thereby discouraged.

Good isn't enough, everything has to be perfect?

This idea that fact checking is preferable or possible or even likely to happen seems wrong. The answer isn't to fix the disease that is Social Media but to inoculate ourselves from it entirely.

Its either that or yield to the idea that human psychology is so malleable that global corporations (and the engineers who make millions working for them) control us like marionettes.

> The “it’s just art bro, don’t take it so seriously” excuse is so tired

There’s nothing wrong with it as long as they’re not presenting it as history but are presenting it as the work of fiction it is.

Unfortunately they’ll, at best, have fine print that says it’s not history but the whole presentation is supposed to encourage the viewers to believe this ks real.

Profit motivated laziness more like.

Just seems to be one more front in this War on Truth we've found ourselves in over the last decade or so. Yes, I know some will say it's been longer than that, the MSM is evil, etc. It's true that the 24-hour news cycle and the replacement of news with infotainment, purveyance of propaganda as news by some outlets, etc. have not been helpful. But, about a decade ago, we entered a completely new phase that is qualitatively different. And it feels like the end stage.

Whether it's for political gain or profit or otherwise, the value of truth and shared reality has been greatly diminished. It's not just that the videos aren't accurate and the creators are so dismissive. It's not even as much about the supply side any more.

It's that half or more of the population is so willing to choose their own reality and could care less whether it's actually true.

gatekeepers gatekeep, artists art. Nothing new here

Based on true events

Oh of course you can counter it. The issue is less with artistic interpretation but with the doublethink happening here. You can depict something as a stylized artistic representation that does not pretend to be accurate. I'm pretty sure the bombing of Guernica did not look exactly as Picasso portrayed it, but his painting is still a powerful piece that we can use to understand the artist's feelings about the historical event. And even in the most rigorous of documentaries, there is still room for artistry: you can convey information in an interesting and thoughtful manner that doesn't sacrifice factuality. You can't really simultaneously say that you strive for accuracy but, at the end of the day, you're "just" creating an artistic interpretation. That seems to conflate artistry with a failure to capture historical accuracy, which is so bizarre since those things are more or less orthogonal to each other.

I think we can safely call a spade a spade here: people making lazy AI historical videos are just that; lazy. They found a cheap and easy way to churn out content that makes money, and their greed outweighs their commitment to truth or historicity.

> I'm really not seeing the harm in these shitty little vignettes

Pompei and the Black Death aren't historical events that continue to evoke grievances today.

But creating an AI generated recreation of the Nakba or Nanjing Massacre can evoke extreme reactions to this day, and actually instigate diplomatic fallout and even violence in the modern world.

If you keep percolating and percolating such content, then it can complete shift narratives.

Technology is inherently neutral - it's us humans who use technology for good and for bad - but moderation has simply not kept up the rate of change.

> it's more concerning that TikTok's algorithms are able to get people to give their attention to such poor quality content

People will continue watching what they want, and recommender algorithms will continue to recommend them as such.

If recommender algorithms are not regulated, then this is the status quo that arises.

On that front, statist countries like Singapore have better managed these problems, but they also pair it with permissive national security legislation.

The problem is in economics and scale. Hollywood productions were pretty expensive, hence, there were few of them – and they could be tracked as known narratives. ("Ah, well, this is Ben Hur. We know this.") Gen-AI content is incredibly cheap and thus potentially ubiquitous, and has a real potential to become normalized in common imagination.

Rare footage of mount Mount Vesuvius erupting, captured on a rare prototype Camera that Leonardo da Vinci invented in ancient times!

The same day you automate that, they will have it reverse engineered and built into the model.

It’s not just the AI videos, all sorts of real videos, movie clips, etc. packaged for optimal vitality have that look these days.

It is a good signal not to watch whatever this is.

Have you looked at, wel, everything? Expecting people who scroll TikTok for 8 hours a day to critically consider what they see is laughable.

Forgive me taking my oafish American hammer to this particular nail, but - this is speech and should not be "regulated," full stop.

The solution to this being used to disseminate falsehoods is education, both about the technology (to make it easier for the average person to spot AI content which at least for the time being is still possible) and about topics likely to have falsehoods spread about them.

You cannot put this genie back in its bottle.

> In most of the third world, far right politics is largely based on settling historic scores. To that end, I'm guessing this will be weaponised by lots of groups to create content to target minorities.

Current events would suggest that the word "third" is redundant.

plus gladiators had it easy it was clearly an attenpt to soil the good names of all the barons and slavers lmaooo

It is not presented as fiction but as actual history. Casual viewers don’t catch on to the lies and believe it.

A lot of people think this is dangerous and distorting because it's presented in a way that leads people to believe that it is accurate

If you spend public funds on NPR or the BBC to produce an educational resource with these kind of problems where the core message was historicity, not some other educational outcome, you'd be wasting national funds and be pilloried for it.

It's contextual. Horrible Histories can make boners. some soft-ed deliverable can make boners about things, not core to the syllabus. If you call it "history" and you want to teach lived experience, then don't put tomato on the roman pizza. It's actually not that hard to get right btw. Mostly, its lazy.

Are you really pushing AI apologism to the point of calling "anality" the concerns of experienced historians? How does this contribute to a reasonable discussion about the dangers of what this video might represent?

I would understand (and not agree) if you said you don't think the videos are dangerous or problematic, but dismissing valid concerns from subject matter experts is just pure tech hybris. And that's quite scary, to be honest, to see how many people already subscribe to this complete lack of critical discussion on the AI video trend.

These videos are viral traps made to make money. They have absolutely no historic base, and yet they are presented as such on social media. I don't care what the authors say, because that's not what 53 million people read when they just see a video that's absolutely inaccurate.

What makes you think there's CGI in that clip?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty-spotted_cat

This is a grossly unfair comment. Do you really expect someone who had dedicated their life to an academic pursuit to also be CGI experts and filmmakers? Why can’t professionals be allowed to criticize without having others fault them?

Edit to add: I’m sure the majority of devs on this site have opinions on current LLMs, is it fair to dismiss everyone’s concerns and tell them “you know how to program, make a better model.”

That feels wrong.

They are not. It’s quite difficult to prompt a generative model to get details correct, and it takes a ton of tries if you can make it work at all. Practically impossible if the model wasn’t trained with data that makes a distinction in what you’re trying to specify.

So creating accurate generative media is categorically more difficult than inaccurate media.

Because it’s a lot easier to make up shit than to create stuff that is vetted?

Also there are videos made by historians or science educators.

Of the top of my head I can think of Flint Dibble who is an paleontologist? and miniminuteman who is a science communicator who also has an archeology degree?

And while both of them have decent to great success on YouTube, their success pales in comparison to the Ancient Aliens and Atlantis video makers, simply because those are more attractive stories even if they’re not real, but are presented as legitimate theories.

Extrapolate and abstract and apply to your area of expertise. See how that feels.

Precedence does not mean preferable.