Fake content of Occupation is 'not educational'

A historian is calling for AI-generated images and videos showing the Occupation and other historical events to be labelled so they can be easily distinguished from historical evidence.

Professor of conflict archaeology and holocaust heritage at the University of Cambridge, Dr Gilly Carr, has written extensively about the Occupation and said AI-generated images of the events were shared daily on social media which was "troubling".

She said: "It's not educational if you're creating fake content, if you're creating a historically inaccurate version of the past."

Jersey and Guernsey were liberated on 9 May 1945, and Sark the following day, after five years of Nazi rule.

"It's so important that people label their photographs if they're going to put them out there," she said. "People who are not specialist on the Occupation will perhaps not know what is accurate".

Carr said Guernsey family members of victims of Nazism had been in contact and said they "were scared" AI-content creators would take their family members details in order to create a video or still images.

"When you have a family member that has been in concentration camps or a Nazi prison, it is so upsetting, you can't even prevent yourself from trying to visualise about what happened to that person during the war," Carr said.

"Then to see them recreated by artificial intelligence and it being wrong, it's sort of like 'no, I don't want to see this, it's traumatic, but it's factually incorrect as well.'"

She said sharing false versions of the past was not educational and disrespectful.

"It's just bad," she said. "You're going to end up with all of these additional photographs online.

"People will start to challenge future generations on whether the Occupation really happened because the thing is, photographs are historical evidence and once you start messing with that and falsifying that, you are falsifying historical evidence.

"That's the problem."

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