Auschwitz Museum Warns Against Fake AI Images Of Victims

The Auschwitz museum warned on Friday against Facebook posts with "harmful" AI-generated fictional images of victims of the Nazi German death camp, condemning them for "falsifying history".

The museum at the site of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau camp has long used its own social media accounts to publish authentic victim photos, names and information to raise Holocaust awareness. 

Now the museum has discovered that at least a couple of Facebook pages were producing similar victim bios but with fictional information or photos. 

"People have started to notice that there are pages, including one called '90's History' where there are short bios of the victims as well as photos that were clearly made by artificial intelligence," said museum deputy spokesman Pawel Sawicki.

"Producing artificial images of real people, or what is even more troubling, producing false identities of victims, is certainly troubling and also very harmful for the memory of those who died at Auschwitz," he told AFP. 

Such posts were harmful because "producing artificial information, last names, is falsifying history", said Sawicki.

This sort of disinformation could even lead to Holocaust denial, he added.

"There is of course a danger that if we have these fake people, then perhaps someone could claim that the whole thing is made up," said Sawicki.

He said the museum was in touch with US tech giant Meta, which owns Facebook, in the hopes that it could look into the matter. 

Nazi Germany built the death camp in the city of Oswiecim after occupying Poland during World War II.

The Holocaust site has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of six million European Jews, one million of whom died at the camp between 1940 and 1945.

More than 100,000 non-Jews also died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, including non-Jewish Poles, Roma and Soviet soldiers.

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