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'Amateur and dangerous': Historians weigh in on viral AI history videos
- grg0 2y agoThese fake AI images/videos always look so over-saturated and fake-HDR'ed, you can probably flag them with a simple histogram check.
- recursive 2y agoThe same day you automate that, they will have it reverse engineered and built into the model.
- grg0 2y agoBuild what into the model? If they stop making fake HDR shit and the videos look unappealing and boring, then it's mission accomplished.
- aikinai 2y agoIt’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.
- userbinator 2y agoOn 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_kyburz 2y agoRare footage of mount Mount Vesuvius erupting, captured on a rare prototype Camera that Leonardo da Vinci invented in ancient times!
- cyberax 2y agoHe was also a time traveler! Edit: still is.
- PessimalDecimal 2y agoAnd will continue to be.
- grg0 2y agoClassic Leonardo, strong vibes.
- naet 2y agoThat might seem obviously preposterous to you, but some people will read it and believe it 100%.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoI'll see it when I believe it.
- rsanek 2y agois it that unbelievable? unless you're interested in history, i think many adults could be fooled as well.
- DiscourseFan 2y agoRe read my comment
- jay_kyburz 2y agowhen they see it, they will believe it!
- tbrownaw 2y agoSo 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 2y agoA 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 2y agoThe 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.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tbrownaw 2y 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.
- floren 2y agoI think we ought to democratize more professions, like surgeons and dentists and airline pilots.
- monooso 2y agoThe word profession implies a level of professionalism that appears to be lacking.
- camillomiller 2y agoI've rarely seen such an egregoius and disingenuous use of "democratization"
- deadbabe 2y agoYou need AI to go through frames shot by shot to point out anachronisms and delete them. Perhaps this would be good for movies too.
- renewiltord 2y ago[flagged]
- unyttigfjelltol 2y agoOne could critique Dateline or the History Channel by nitpicking accuracy as well. All of those efforts require dedication, and that's all that's standing between a production effort and the homogenization of history.
- daseiner1 2y agoNuclear weapons were dangerous too. And switchblades. And riding a bike without a helmet. Not that interesting.
- renewiltord 2y agoYep, that’s the point. There’s zero information content in claims of danger. Otherwise there would be inverse signal.
- abletonlive 2y ago[flagged]
- boringg 2y agoBig difference. Not even worth accepting your challenge. You think the subtitle differences by modern day historians vs completely wrong AI histories is comparable?
- abletonlive 2y agoYes I do think the dangers of modern day historians are comparable and your comment is a good example of why. You've downplayed professional historians as having "subtle differences" by presumption which highlights the exact danger that I speak of. The danger of professional historians is that they pretend to not inject bias into their interpretation of history, and a lot of people fall for this via appeal to authority and take their interpretation at face value.
- defrost 2y ago> The danger of professional historians is that they pretend to not inject bias into their interpretation of history Not true at all. Good professional modern historians are well aware of bias introduced by PoV, material selection, etc. They'll often discuss their own bias and the journals they publish in all too often have Meta Overviews that address the breadth of presentation on particular sibjects. Here's an example of a profession historian looking at the range of views in the community on the decision to drop atomic weapons: https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-use-the-bomb-a-consensus-view/ https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-u...
- abletonlive 2y agoFunny to choose an example where even the author admits: > Personally, I don’t wade into these questions much, professionally, or even here on the blog. They honestly don’t interest me very much. Maybe it’s a sign of how post-post-Cold War I am? I don’t know. To me it has always seemed like splitting very fine hairs, trying to make distinctions without much difference. In my mind, the atomic bombings were plainly not ethically very different than the previous firebombings of Japan or Germany But hey, I’m glad you found an example of a historian that admits there are “hazards” to being a historian. Do you really think this one example of a historian being self aware precludes what I’ve said about historians being dangerous? I think it supports my argument. For every one historian that acknowledges their own bias there are plenty that do not. Just as I would be able to provide examples of amateur historian AI content that even historians would not find problematic. The difference is that I would not use my example to say that AI videos are not dangerous. Funny in a world of “history” channel where many of these professional historians are used when they can take a break from their regularly programmed conspiracy theories that anybody could with a straight face say they are any less dangerous. The amount of revisionism in history should have been a clue already but how much more defilement of our past can one ignore before calling the entire field out for what it is: a tool for propaganda
- gyomu 2y 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.
- tbrownaw 2y agoGood isn't enough, everything has to be perfect?
- vkou 2y agoWhen 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.
- djeastm 2y 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 2y 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
- kamaal 2y agoIt 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 2y agoForgive 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 2y agoIsn'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.
- 13_9_7_7_5_18 2y ago[dead]
- FranzFerdiNaN 2y agoThe American obsession with being allowed to lie and claim it has the same worth as the truth is insane.
- sincerely 2y agoI 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 2y ago[flagged]
- aaron695 2y ago[dead]
- felizuno 2y agoWhile 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.
- FranzFerdiNaN 2y agoHave you looked at, wel, everything? Expecting people who scroll TikTok for 8 hours a day to critically consider what they see is laughable.
- felizuno 2y agoAre 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 2y 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.
- ralph84 2y agoThis comes across as gatekeeping by the historians. Why don’t they make more accurate videos themselves. The same tools are available to them.
- lukev 2y agoThey 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.
- azemetre 2y agoThis 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.
- addicted 2y agoBecause 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.
- camillomiller 2y agoExtrapolate and abstract and apply to your area of expertise. See how that feels.
- cadamsdotcom 2y agoConsider 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 2y agoPrecedence does not mean preferable.
- istjohn 2y agoHollywood 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 2y 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.
- rsanek 2y ago> Technology is inherently neutral especially when it comes to media, Postman would pretty strongly disagree here. https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034 https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034
- masswerk 2y agoThe 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.
- somenameforme 2y agoThis 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."
- ggm 2y agoIf 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.
- somenameforme 2y 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.
- ggm 2y agoI Claudius was made in 1976 by BBC entertainment. It might have screened in schools but that was not it's primary purpose. But, carried into the modern era I am pretty sure historians would mutter about the many solecisms. None the less it was better than AI. Much of the history about roman times is under reconsideration in the light of things like new digs in Pompeii. People projected current social values onto what they found, DNA analysis now permits much stronger indications of filiality or patriality of the remains. "oh, this is a mother protecting her child" can turn out to be a male, and an un-related child female. How this is re-interpreted is not always clear. Likewise metallurgy can change our view of history. The huntarian museum in Glasgow University has 4 coins, held by past antiquarians and historians to be crude forgeries. They turn out from metallurgy to be real, and futhermore confirm an emperor held for a very long time to be speculative, and undocumented. We now have structural evidence of his existence. AI tiktoks aren't currently helping here. They aren't providing visuals which carry the history forward, they just project classicly bad tropes. Sure, they're entertaining. So is "gladiator" but historians had enough on their plate there.
- theRealArgherna 2y agoIs this... gatekeeping?
- sorryimgreen 2y agoYeah, 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 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W86cTIoMv2U Not to mention Planet Earth, which feels like watching Finding Nemo
- crtasm 2y agoWhat makes you think there's CGI in that clip? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty-spotted_cat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rusty-spotted_cat