Episode
AI is distorting the Holocaust (feat. Clara Mansfeld)
- Podcast
- Lock and Code
- Published
- May 17, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 2121
- Processing state
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- https://lock-and-code.captivate.fm/episode/ai-is-distorting-the-holocaust-feat-clara-mansfeld
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Summary
In May of last year, a warning about AI came from somewhere unexpected: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Posting publicly on social media, the museum warned about a Facebook account using generative AI to create fake images of people who died in the Holocaust. The people in said images were sometimes real—with real names, birthplaces, and stories of deportation that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum itself had shared before. They had real faces captured in real surviving photographs, which were likely abused to generate the false images. In other words, someone, or some team of people online, was deepfaking the Holocaust. As the Auschwitz museum wrote online : “These are not real photos of the victims. They are digital inventions, often stylized or sanitized, that risk turning remembrance into fictionalized performance. The history of Auschwitz is a well-documented story. Altering its visual record with AI imagery introduces distortion, no matter the intent.” Months later, the public found out what that intent was: money. A BBC investigation found an international network of Facebook accounts posting AI-generated images to earn money from those images’ potential virality. It’s a problem sometimes referred to as “AI slop” but it comes with a major incentive. When accounts that make these kinds of images are invited to Facebook’s content monetization program, they can make $1,000 a month for posting anything that gets clicks. And on Facebook, the BBC found, that means several accounts posting AI-generated images about the Holocaust. As the BBC reported: “AI spammers have posted fake images purporting to be from inside [Auschwitz], such as a prisoner playing a violin or lovers meeting at the boundaries of fences—attracting tens of thousands of likes and shares.” The…