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

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy87076pdw3o

by defrost • 1 year ago

70 85 1 year ago

On the other hand, I think this makes it even clearer that it's easy to manipulate the truth, since now more people can do it. Before, it was only a small subset of the population who had the ability to, and they were more easily believed.

jay_kyburz3• 1 year ago

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

cyberax• 1 year ago

He was also a time traveler!

Edit: still is.

naet• 1 year ago

That might seem obviously preposterous to you, but some people will read it and believe it 100%.

tbrownaw6• 1 year ago

So people are doing historical fiction in video format? That's kinda cool, even if the people doing it aren't experts being meticulous about every last detail.

kochikame• 1 year ago

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

LAC-Tech• 1 year ago

The majority of the population, including I'd say the majority of people on this site, think historical dramas are accurate. They may not phrase it as such but they implicitly believe things on the screen.

tbrownaw6• 1 year ago

A lot of people

Well, at least the couple people interviewed for the article who don't want casuals intruding into their newly democratized profession.

deadbabe• 1 year ago

You need AI to go through frames shot by shot to point out anachronisms and delete them. Perhaps this would be good for movies too.

gyomu• 1 year ago

Dan, who created the video of Pompeii, says he recognises a lots of details in his videos are historically inaccurate. "AI-generated content isn't perfect, and while I strive for accuracy, these videos are more about evoking the feeling of a time period rather than being a 100% factual recreation. "They're more like artistic interpretations rather than strict documentaries."

As someone technical who works in creative circles, I hear this kind of reasoning all the time and it drives me nuts. The “it’s just art bro, don’t take it so seriously” excuse is so tired, but like the best fake excuses there’s no way to counter it.

djeastm• 1 year ago

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.

HideousKojima• 1 year ago

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.

No such thing ever existed

tbrownaw6• 1 year ago

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

vkou• 1 year ago

When you see the world in black and white, you completely miss out that there are a million shades of gray in between.

It's not that good isn't enough, it's that it's not good enough.

tmpz222• 1 year ago

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.

unclebucknasty3• 1 year ago

inoculate ourselves from it entirely.

By that do you mean stop using it entirely? Because I don't think it's possible for many (maybe most) people to engage without being affected—at least with the currently prominent social media formats.

HeatrayEnjoyer• 1 year ago

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

But it is that malleable, who would even dispute that?

addicted2• 1 year ago

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.

__del__• 1 year ago

if we're aiming to present fiction, we should replace phrases like "not 100% accurate," with "not accurate."

too many dummies read a line like not 100% accurate and assume the content must be something like 90% accurate.

forthac• 1 year ago

Profit motivated laziness more like.

unclebucknasty3• 1 year ago

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.

ujkiolp• 1 year ago

gatekeepers gatekeep, artists art. Nothing new here

FranzFerdiNaN4• 1 year ago

Prompting an AI isn’t making art. The result can be fine, the tech works, but it doesn’t make you an artist.

squigz• 1 year ago

Commenters comment...

mike_ivanov• 1 year ago

Based on true events

brendoelfrendo• 1 year ago

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.

kamaal• 1 year ago

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

I do believe bulk of the use for this more than for education purposes, will be for propaganda, radicalisation etc.

While the makers might get away making 'its just art' excuse. This will be a new round of fake news/history flood unseen like ever before. Every bit of vague/abstract statement, or even an absent detail in history books can be taken out of context, or just made from fiction to create narratives against vulnerable groups of people.

One wonders how this will be regulated or if it can even be regulated.

When people talk of AI safety, more than terminator/skynet style apocalypse I largely imagine these sort of things to cause more short/middle term damage.

pc86• 1 year ago

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.

rixed• 1 year ago

Isn't education also "just speach" that must not be regulated then?

If not, then I believe anything that present history is education, be it on YouTube or in a classroom.

I believe this not because of some preconception or ideology, but because I observed that non classroom material is often referenced by people looking for historical justifications.

FranzFerdiNaN4• 1 year ago

The American obsession with being allowed to lie and claim it has the same worth as the truth is insane.

monooso2• 1 year ago

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.

sincerely• 1 year ago

I don't really see how this is any different from a videogame or tv show set in some historical time period - it's clearly fiction and there are always historical inaccuracies, often egregious (a newspaper in Gladiator? )

gunian• 1 year ago

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

Tagbert• 1 year ago

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

felizuno2• 1 year ago

While I find it annoying to present inaccurate details as "history" I still think we need to put the onus on information consumers to think critically and go beyond taking everything at face value. The world is full of manipulation, lies of omission, and actual lies as well. Taking things at face value (especially on TikTok and YouTube) is foolish. If you don't want to be a fool the ball is in your court, the world will not be becoming more foolproof.

FranzFerdiNaN4• 1 year ago

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

felizuno2• 1 year ago

Are you serious? That's like saying expecting people to stay healthy while eating every meal out of a garbage dumpster is laughable. The solution isn't to change the content, it's to stop eating out of a garbage dumpster. And yes, I think you should exercise the self control to not overconsume things, whether it's information or ice cream. If you bombard yourself with more information than you can critically process then that's a "you" problem.

RajT88• 1 year ago

Despite the videos offering millions a window into history, a number of historians have shared concerns about the accuracy of the content and whether AI can truly resurrect the past, or are we just seeing a polished, modernised version of history designed for engagement?

If you have to ask... The answer should be clear.

grg03• 1 year ago

These fake AI images/videos always look so over-saturated and fake-HDR'ed, you can probably flag them with a simple histogram check.

recursive• 1 year ago

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

grg03• 1 year ago

Build what into the model? If they stop making fake HDR shit and the videos look unappealing and boring, then it's mission accomplished.

aikinai• 1 year ago

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.

ralph84• 1 year ago

This comes across as gatekeeping by the historians. Why don’t they make more accurate videos themselves. The same tools are available to them.

azemetre• 1 year ago

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.

lukev• 1 year ago

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.

addicted2• 1 year ago

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.

camillomiller3• 1 year ago

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

cadamsdotcom• 1 year ago

Consider storytales told around the campfire. Are they true? Before the internet and journalists, you had to decide for yourself.

We are rebounding from a historically brief period of high trust to something more historically normal.

The difference between campfire stories and the world we live in is our world has journalists who fact check and surface falsehoods. Sure, there’s a delay. The work takes a moment. So we hang out while experts do the debunking for us.

That’s a pretty good state of affairs.

wesselbindt• 1 year ago

Precedence does not mean preferable.

istjohn• 1 year ago

Hollywood has been creating historically inaccurate portrayals for over a hundred years. I'm really not seeing the harm in these shitty little vignettes. If anything, it's more concerning that TikTok's algorithms are able to get people to give their attention to such poor quality content.

alephnerd• 1 year ago

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.

rsanek2• 1 year ago

Technology is inherently neutral

especially when it comes to media, Postman would pretty strongly disagree here. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034

masswerk• 1 year ago

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.

somenameforme6• 1 year ago

This sounds much more like gatekeeping than genuine concern about "dangerous" content. The complaints the article mentions:

- houses wouldn't have had large glazed windows

- there were no trains (a train track is visible)

- Vesuvius didn't start with lava spewing everywhere

- stemmed wine glasses and pepper mills didn't exist

- people would be reclining while eating, not sitting on dining chairs

- the bread roll is a modern loaf, not an ancient one

If you're going to nipick to this degree of anality then essentially any historical documentary ever made is "amateur and dangerous."

ggm4• 1 year ago

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.

somenameforme6• 1 year ago

"I Claudius" is perhaps my favorite series of all time, produced by the BBC during its golden age. You might argue the core was not historicity, but then again it'd seem odd to hold the BBC to a lesser standard than a TikTok video for historical recreations. But it's extremely informative in many ways and also extremely misleading to plainly false in others. It's simply the nature of historical recreation.

It did things such as rather dramatically change the widely recorded historical personality/interests/etc of Claudius, presumably to make him a more likeable 'protagonist'. And they weren't pilloried for it whatsoever but rather drowned, in praise and awards.

camillomiller3• 1 year ago

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.

theRealArgherna• 1 year ago

Is this... gatekeeping?

sorryimgreen• 1 year ago

Yeah, and meanwhile BBC are pretty comfortable with using blatant CGI to intentionally mislead people into believing that there are impossibly small cats in the world:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W86cTIoMv2U

Not to mention Planet Earth, which feels like watching Finding Nemo

crtasm• 1 year ago

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

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

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

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