AI is distorting the Holocaust (feat. Clara Mansfeld)

AI is distorting the Holocaust (feat. Clara Mansfeld)

From Lock and Code by Malwarebytes

May 17, 2026 · 35 min · Season 7 · Episode 10

About this episode

The episode discusses the misuse of AI to create fake images related to the Holocaust and the implications of such distortions.

In May of last year, a warning about AI came from somewhere unexpected: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. Posting publicly on social media, the museum warned about a Facebook account using generative AI to create fake images of people who died in the Holocaust. The people in said images were sometimes real—with real names, birthplaces, and stories of deportation that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum itself had shared before. They had real faces captured in real surviving photographs, which were likely abused to generate the false images. In other words, someone, or some team of people online, was deepfaking the Holocaust. As the Auschwitz museum wrote online : “These are not real photos of the victims. They are digital inventions, often stylized or sanitized, that risk turning remembrance into fictionalized performance. The history of Auschwitz is a well-documented story. Altering its visual record with AI imagery introduces distortion, no matter the intent.” Months later, the public found out what that intent was: money. A BBC investigation found an international network of Facebook accounts posting AI-generated images to earn money from those images’ potential virality…

People in this episode

Guest: Clara Mansfeld

Topics covered

  • AI
  • Holocaust
  • deepfakes
  • digital distortion
  • social media
  • monetization

Keywords

  • AI
  • Holocaust
  • deepfake
  • Auschwitz
  • social media
  • monetization
  • digital images

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, BBC, Facebook

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