Latest news with #PawelSawicki
NDTV
24-05-2025
- Politics
- NDTV
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.
Yahoo
12-02-2025
- Politics
- Yahoo
Auschwitz Memorial fights disinformation with new online lesson
The memorial museum at the former German concentration camp Auschwitz wants to counter the disinformation of Holocaust deniers with a new online educational resource. The development of the internet favours the spread of false ideologies such as Holocaust denial, memorial spokesman Pawel Sawicki to the PAP news agency. "Holocaust denial is nothing more than a conspiracy theory based on lies and hatred," Sawicki said. The online lesson, which is also available as a podcast on the streaming service Spotify, is divided into different chapters. They take a look at the strategies of Holocaust denial and its ideological background, but above all analyse the specific myths and lies spread by the deniers. One of the falsehoods, for example, is a claim that a delegation from the International Red Cross visited the concentration and extermination camp at Auschwitz in Nazi-occupied Poland. They allegedly found no cause for complaint regarding the conditions of the prisoners there. The online lesson clarifies that IRC representative Maurice Rossel did want to visit the camp on September 27, 1944, but was not allowed in. An officer merely told him that the mail for the prisoners had been handed over in full. The online lesson makes it clear Rossel was not in the part of the camp where the prisoners were, let alone in Auschwitz-Birkenau where the gas chambers were, and therefore had no knowledge of the living conditions of the prisoners or the mass murder of people in Auschwitz. The extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau is symbolic of the Holocaust and the horrors of Nazism. Around 1.1 million people died there between 1940 and 1945, most of them Jews. They were shot, murdered in gas chambers or died of hunger and disease.
