As world marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day, concern over "AI slop" rewriting history
As the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day on Tuesday, experts warned that a flood of "AI slop" is threatening efforts to preserve the memory of Nazi crimes and the millions of Jewish people killed during World War II.
Images seen by the AFP news agency include an emaciated and apparently blind man standing in the snow at the Nazi concentration camp Flossenbuerg, and a viral image of a little girl with curly hair on a tricycle falsely presented as a 13-year-old Berliner who died at the Auschwitz extermination camp.
Such content — whether produced as clickbait for commercial gain or for political motives — has proliferated over the past year, distorting the history of Nazi Germany's murder of six million European Jews during World War II.
Early examples emerged in the spring of 2025, but by the end of the year, "AI slop" on the subject "was being shown very frequently," historian Iris Groschek told AFP.
On some sites, examples of such content were being posted once per minute, said Groschek, who works at Holocaust memorial sites in Hamburg, including the Neuengamme concentration camp.
With the exponential advances in AI, "the phenomenon is growing," Jens-Christian Wagner, director of the foundation that manages the Buchenwald and Mittelbau-Dora memorials, told AFP.
Several Holocaust memorials and commemorative associations this month issued an open letter warning about the rising quantity of this "entirely fabricated" content.
Some of them are churned out by content farms that exploit "the emotional impact of the Holocaust to achieve maximum reach with minimal effort," it said.
The picture supposedly from Flossenbuerg camp falls into this category, as it was shown on a page claiming to share, "true, human stories from the darkest chapters of the past."
But the memorials warned that fake content was also being created, "specifically to dilute historical facts, shift victim and perpetrator roles, or spread revisionist narratives."
Wagner points, for example, to images of seemingly "well-fed prisoners, meant to suggest that conditions in concentration camps weren't really that bad."
The Frankfurt-based Anne Frank Educational Center has warned of a "flood" of AI-generated content and propaganda "in which the Holocaust is denied or trivialized, with its victims ridiculed."
By distorting history, AI-generated images have "very concrete consequences for how people perceive the Nazi era," said Groschek.
The results of trivializing or denying the Holocaust have been seen in the attitudes of some younger visitors to the camps, particularly from "rural parts of eastern Germany ... in which far-right thinking has become dominant," said Wagner.
In their open letter, the memorials called on social media platforms to "proactively combat AI content that distorts history" and to "exclude accounts that disseminate such content from all monetisation programs."
"The challenge for society as a whole is to develop ethical and historically responsible standards for this technology," they said, adding: "Platform operators have a particular responsibility in this regard."
German Culture Minister Wolfram Weimer said in a statement to AFP: "I support the memorials' call to clearly label AI-generated images and remove them when necessary."
He said that making money from such imagery should be prevented.
"This is a matter of respect for the millions of people who were killed and persecuted under the Nazis' reign of terror," he said, reminding the platforms that they have obligations under the EU's Digital Services Act.
Groschek said none of the American social media companies had responded to the memorials' letter, including Meta, the owner of Facebook and Instagram.
TikTok responded by saying it wanted to exclude the accounts in question from monetization and implement, "automated verification," according to Groschek.
