Fake AI history photos cloud the past

A fake image of Wright Brothers generated by AI.

A wave of touching photos showing great moments in time is fascinating amateur historians online. The problem? They are not real — and may 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 — 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.

"AI has caused a tsunami of fake history, especially images," said Jo Hedwig Teeuwisse, 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."

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.

But 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.

  Hiroshima reproduction 

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 president John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, was himself shot dead by Jack Ruby in 1963.

Other images on Midjourney purport to show the explosion of the atom bomb over Hiroshima in 1945, the invasion of Prague by Soviet-allied troops in 1968 and even a vision of the Roman Coliseum in...