Historians Alarmed As AI Floods YouTube With Inaccurate History

AI is taking over YouTube’s history content, threatening authentic creators while altering how people understand historical events.

AI-generated history videos are flooding YouTube, confusing viewers and threatening the work of real historians and creators, as detailed in a new report by 404Media.

The press release reports how viewer recalls waking up at 3 a.m. to a glitching video called ‘Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and More’. “In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality… FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE,” the AI narrator said in a fake British accent.

The next night, the viewer discovered multiple new channels on their homepage, including ‘Sleepless Historian’, ‘Boring History Bites’, and ‘Dreamoria’. 404 Media notes how these videos span more than three hours, covering obscure topics such as medieval diseases and brothels from Pompeii.

However, most of these videos are “slop content,” which consists mainly of AI-generated narratives that repeat shallow information.

“It’s completely shocking to me,” Pete Kelly, who runs the popular ‘History Time’ channel, said to 404 Media. “It used to take six months to make a video, now someone can do the same thing in a day. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I’m fearful because this is everywhere,” Kelly added.

“I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they’re historically inaccurate… We need to be looking at the past and it needs to be nuanced and we need to be aware of where the evidence or an argument comes from,” Kelly said to 404Media. He has even begun appearing in videos himself to show viewers he is a real person.

Amateur anthropologist Pete from ‘Ancient Americas’ agreed, noting that AI videos often produce “vague and surface-level” content and “slideshow-quality” visuals, failing to replicate the depth of human research, as noted by 404Media.

‘The French Whisperer’, another creator, said to 404Media that his YouTube views dropped by 60% over the past year, and attributes this loss to AI content surge. “An entire niche can be threatened overnight by AI […] Unless you have millions of followers, this is not a reasonable career choice,” he said.

AI-generated content has already caused significant damage to historical content beyond YouTube. On Facebook, spammers used Meta’s monetization program to create fake Auschwitz prisoner images, deceiving users.

Social media users create fake stories, which Pawel Sawicki from the Auschwitz Memorial describes as, “Here we have somebody making up the stories… for some kind of strange emotional game that is happening on social media,” occurring on these platforms.

More broadly, researchers warn that historical content created by AI poses a threat by implanting false memories, creating false historical narratives that alter how people remember actual events.

Despite the AI flood, creators like Kelly and Pete remain committed. “AI may be polluting the river but I still have to swim in it or sink,” Pete said to 404 Media. “I take the research very seriously […] I’ve never seen AI do this. It’s always a slideshow of crappy AI images,” Pete added.

Kelly concluded: “It’s worrying to me just for humanity […] for the state of knowledge in the world.”