"Repetition does not transform a lie into a truth"
Franklin D. Roosevelt
AI offers new tools for Holocaust education but its misuse can exacerbate denial and distortion
Holocaust denial remains a cornerstone of modern antisemitic conspiratorial ideologies, often amplified by online misinformation and hate speech. In this context, Artificial Intelligence (AI) poses both significant opportunities and alarming risks to the understanding and preservation of Holocaust history. While AI offers new tools to engage with and educate about the past, its misuse can exacerbate denial and distortion, threatening the integrity of historical memory.
In June 2024, UNESCO and the World Jewish Congress released a landmark report titled "AI and the Holocaust: Rewriting History?". This document follows a 2022 study “History Under Attack: Holocaust Denial and Distortion on Social Media” and shifts the focus to the threats and opportunities posed by AI in historical preservation. The report highlights the urgent need for ethical regulations to prevent AI from becoming a tool for denial while showcasing its potential to revolutionize Holocaust education through innovative, empathy-driven experiences. It also offers recommendations for policymakers, educators, cultural institutions, and AI developers to safeguard historical truth in this rapidly evolving digital era.
AI’s ability to create immersive and interactive educational tools has already transformed how younger generations engage with Holocaust history. These advancements make learning more accessible and relatable, ensuring that the lessons of the Holocaust endure in an age where personal survivor testimony is becoming rarer.
One such example is Dimensions in Testimony, developed by the USC Shoah Foundation. This project uses AI to simulate real-time conversations with Holocaust survivors through pre-recorded responses. Students can ask questions and receive personalized answers, fostering empathy and deeper understanding by bringing survivor stories to life in an engaging format.
Another groundbreaking initiative, Tell Me, Inge, blends AI with augmented reality to share the experiences of Holocaust survivor Inge Auerbacher. Created by Meta and StoryFile in collaboration with UNESCO, the World Jewish Congress, and the Claims Conference, this program integrates 3D animations with survivor narratives, allowing users to interactively explore her testimony.
Israeli company D-ID has also embraced AI to memorialize Holocaust history. In partnership with the March of the Living, the company produced videos recounting the stories of fighters from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. These projects demonstrate how AI can connect younger audiences to historical events, ensuring that the voices of Holocaust survivors resonate across generations.
Yet, despite these positive contributions, the use of AI in Holocaust education must be approached with caution. Ethical considerations and safeguards are essential to maintain the authenticity of historical narratives and prevent potential misuse.
While AI’s potential for enhancing Holocaust education is immense, its misuse could profoundly harm historical truth. The technology’s ability to generate content at scale, its reliance on algorithms prone to bias, and the rise of deepfake technology pose significant risks to the preservation of accurate Holocaust history.
AI-powered tools can rapidly produce large volumes of Holocaust-denying or antisemitic content, including texts, images, and videos. These outputs can be disseminated in multiple languages, making moderation and fact-checking increasingly difficult. As a result, malicious actors could exploit AI to flood digital spaces with misinformation, deepening public confusion about historical events.
Deepfake technology, which creates realistic but fake videos and images, represents a particularly insidious threat. This technology can be used to fabricate footage of Holocaust survivors making statements they never said, undermining trust in genuine testimony. Such distortions could mislead the public, particularly younger audiences who primarily consume information through social media.
AI systems often oversimplify complex historical events, which can lead to inaccuracies. For example, responses generated by AI tools like Bard have conflated details from unrelated Holocaust events, while ChatGPT has misrepresented key documents. Bard’s responses to questions about the 1941 massacres in Liubar, Ukraine, incorporate details from the more well-known Babyn Yar narrative, leading to historically inaccurate claims about how the victims were killed and the potential involvement of Ukrainian collaborators in the massacre. In another instance (though not mentioned in the UNESCO report), a search on the Wannsee Protocol conducted by ChatGPT produced an incorrect response: the AI asserted that this document referenced the use of gas chambers to exterminate Jews. In reality, the Wannsee Protocol, a crucial historical document from 1942 in which Nazi leaders discussed the "Final Solution," does not mention gas chambers, though it clearly demonstrates the Nazis’ genocidal intent. Such errors are particularly concerning, as the Wannsee Protocol, often contested by deniers, is indisputable evidence of an extermination plan, and its misinterpretation can weaken understanding of the Holocaust.
Finally, algorithmic biases integrated into AI systems can lead certain chatbots to downplay Holocaust facts or promote biased content aligned with far-right perspectives. UNESCO’s report highlights, for instance, linguistic biases in search results, where images of concentration camps appear much less frequently in Russian-language searches than in English. This difference in accessibility to visual sources could falsely suggest a lesser gravity of the Holocaust depending on the language of the search, thereby contributing to a distorted historical perception. These biases, deeply rooted in AI systems, can be exploited to downplay the horror of the Holocaust, particularly in specific linguistic or cultural contexts.
The speed and scale of content production enabled by AI, combined with algorithmic biases, therefore pose a high risk to the faithful preservation of Holocaust memory, making interventions and protective measures essential.
To address these threats while harnessing AI’s potential, UNESCO’s report provides actionable recommendations for policymakers, educators, cultural institutions, and AI developers. Collaboration across sectors is essential to ensure that AI serves as a tool for preserving, rather than distorting, Holocaust memory.
Governments must establish regulatory frameworks that prioritize ethical AI practices, transparency, and accountability. These frameworks should include measures to combat misinformation and hate speech, with oversight mechanisms to monitor their effectiveness. International cooperation is critical to harmonize standards and address the global nature of digital misinformation.
Digital and AI literacy programs should be integrated into curricula to empower students to critically assess AI-generated content. Teachers must also receive training to guide students in identifying bias and misinformation, ensuring that historical complexity is not lost in oversimplified narratives.
Cultural institutions should continue digitizing historical records and collaborating with AI developers to create tools that expand access to reliable information. Clear guidelines must be established to ensure that AI-driven projects respect the integrity of Holocaust narratives.
Developers must implement safeguards to prevent their platforms from amplifying denial or distortion. This includes collaborating with historians, survivors, and Jewish communities to ensure authenticity, integrating cryptographic tools to verify content, and providing transparent sourcing for historical claims.
While AI presents powerful tools for Holocaust memory and history, unregulated development poses risks to historical truth. Proactive collaboration and rigorous ethical standards are therefore essential to prevent distortion and preserve the integrity of this historical period. UNESCO’s report highlights this need for regulation, and it seems particularly important to reinforce this aspect by suggesting the creation of an international organization dedicated to AI regulation. This entity would be responsible for overseeing the ethics of AI practices and ensuring that developed tools uphold standards of historical truth and human dignity, protecting Holocaust history and other historical periods from manipulation.
Preserving Holocaust memory is not just about honoring the past—it is a fight for truth in an age where misinformation can shape perceptions and ideologies. We must ensure that history itself remains faithful and its representation is not altered to serve ideological or commercial interests. As George Orwell warned, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Protecting historical truth is essential for future generations to access an authentic understanding of these events. Vigilance is therefore essential to ensure that AI contributes to a rigorous and respectful transmission of history, without manipulations that could dangerously influence contemporary democracies and their very future.
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