AI and the Holocaust: Rewriting History? The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Understanding the Holocaust

UNESCO. “AI and the Holocaust: Rewriting History? The Impact of Artificial Intelligence on Understanding the Holocaust.” UNESCO Digital Library, 2024. https://doi.org/10.54675/ZHJC6844

Concepts:  AI threats | Value-sensitive design | Liar’s dividend | Data voids | Stakeholder collaboration 

Keywords:  Holocaust | AI ethics | Disinformation | Memory preservation | Education policy

This commissioned report constitutes the most authoritative institutional statement currently available on the intersection of AI and Holocaust memory. It identifies five major threat categories: AI inventing false narratives, deepfake technology, manipulation of AI to spread hate speech, algorithmic bias reinforcing dominant narratives while marginalising lesser-known histories, and AI oversimplifying the Holocaust’s complexity. Against these threats, it documents genuine benefits (large-scale archival processing, interactive testimony) and issues specific recommendations to policymakers, educators, archives, AI developers, and researchers. Its central normative position — that AI development in relation to Holocaust content must involve close collaboration with survivors and descendants as design partners, not merely as subjects — is the institutional articulation of the log’s foundational claim: AI can only do with testimony what human beings enable it to do.

“The threats associated with AI on safeguarding the record of the Holocaust are manifold.” (UNESCO, 2024, p. 3)

“Tech companies must work closely with the Jewish community, Holocaust survivors and their descendants.” (UNESCO, 2024, p. 1)

“AI can organize, categorize and search the content of a testimony.” (UNESCO, 2024, p. 13)