Holocaust AI fakes spark alarm
But there is no such Holocaust victim and the photo is not real, but generated by AI.
Content creators, often based in South Asia, are churning out such posts for money, targeting Westerners' emotional reactions to the Holocaust, in which six million Jewish people died, researchers told AFP.
Critics say that such AI-generated images, text and videos are offensive and contribute to Holocaust distortion by conjuring up a "fantasy-land Auschwitz".
The Auschwitz museum sounded the alarm over the trend.
"We're dealing with the creation of a false reality -- because it is falsifying images... falsifying history," museum spokesman Pawel Sawicki told AFP.
The museum at the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi concentration and extermination camp, where one million Jews were murdered in Nazi-occupied Poland, first noticed the posts in May, Sawicki said.
Some reproduced the museum's posts about victims but changed the images using AI, without flagging this.
"You can see the photo is based on the original but it's completely changed", Sawicki said.
A recent post about a Polish man was recreated with an "outrageous" AI image of an Asian man, he added.
In others, "both the photo and the story are fabricated"" Sawicki said, portraying "people who never existed".
A girl with a flower in her hair is named as Yvette Kahn who died in Auschwitz. No such victim appears in databases of the victims.
In other cases, details do not match.
A girl called Hanni Lore or Hannelore Kaufmann lived in western Germany -- not Berlin -- and died in Sobibor camp -- not Auschwitz, according to Israel's Yad Vashem remembrance centre.
Posts add emotive elements such as Kaufmann loving her tricycle.
But the Auschwitz museum spokesman stressed: "We generally don't have information about these people's lives."
Complaints to Facebook owner Meta have not resulted in action, Sawicki said. AFP
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