Today, February 10th, is Safer Internet Day, focused on the theme ‘Smart tech, safe choices – Exploring the safe and responsible use of AI’. The nature of Holocaust-related content available online, including through the use of AI, is an ever-present concern for the team at the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education. In 2024, UNESCO (p. 4) reported five major concerns associated with AI in relation to preserving the historical truth about the Holocaust:
- AI automated content may invent facts about the Holocaust
- Falsifying historical evidence: Deepfake Technology
- AI models can be manipulated to spread hate speech
- Algorithmic bias can spread Holocaust denial
- Oversimplifying history
Clearly, these concerns present educators with the complex task of equipping students with sound knowledge about the Holocaust to enable them to recognise troubling and erroneous content when they encounter it, as well as supporting them to respond appropriately to it. For example, students can be shown how to report this content to platform moderators and understand the importance of not commenting on this type of material or sharing it (even posting comments which call out and criticise problematic online material can amplify its visibility).
In recent research conducted by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education with 2,778 students, we were reassured to find that many students were wary of AI-generated content online, especially in relation to the Holocaust. We found:
- 86.1% of students (in Years 8-13) had not used an AI chatbot to learn about the Holocaust.
- And 62.1% of students had little or no trust in AI chatbots such as ChatGPT.
While this is encouraging, the research found that students were encountering a lot of unverified Holocaust-related content on social media and video platforms. For instance, 59.4% of students reported that they had come across online content about the Holocaust when they had not been searching for it. Of these students 66.4% said this happened on TikTok and 36.9% said it happened on YouTube. Thus, there is the possibility of students coming across AI-generated content about the Holocaust on these platforms and not always realising it is AI-generated nor recognising the risk of it potentially containing distorted or falsified facts about the Holocaust.
Collectively, these findings highlight how critical it is for students to have sound knowledge about the Holocaust so they can recognise and challenge misinformation or disinformation about this history – both through AI-generated content and user-generated content. Consequently, teachers need access to high quality professional development courses and classroom materials to support them in teaching about the Holocaust, such as those provided by the UCL Centre for Holocaust Education. The importance of this was demonstrated in focus group discussions with students as part of our research. These young people told us that when determining if online content was credible, they considered if it aligned with what their teacher had told them. One student at a UCL Centre for Holocaust Education Beacon School in the North East explained: “You can think about what you’ve learnt at school and if the first thing they’ve said doesn’t align with it then you just won’t watch the rest of the video because if that’s a lie then the rest of it probably is as well.”
To find out more about the Centre’s free professional development programmes for teachers and to access our range of free downloadable resources, visit our website: https://holocausteducation.org.uk/
