(Paris) A mother and child crying during the Great Depression, a soldier exhausted during the Vietnam War… These photographs relayed on social networks are confoundingly realistic, but they were generated by artificial intelligence (AI).

Most often in black and white, so-called historical snapshots are abundantly shared by cultural pages, but also by Internet users on their personal accounts, at the risk of skewing the vision of history.

In addition to anonymous figures, they sometimes feature prominent personalities, such as Theodore Roosevelt in 1898 when he left for Cuba at the height of the Spanish-American War. Or the Wright brothers, pioneers of aviation, after their first powered flight in 1903.

In the case of the two American engineers, an AI-generated image circulated on Facebook shows them posing smiling in front of their plane. Whereas most of the real archive images of the two brothers show them either looking serious in an austere setting, or as anonymous silhouettes in the distance, busily working on their prototype.. . Source