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This week on the Lock and Code podcast…

In May of last year, a warning about AI came from somewhere unexpected: The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.

Posting publicly on social media, the museum warned about a Facebook account using generative AI to create fake images of people who died in the Holocaust. Despite using AI to generate fake images, the people in said images were sometimes real. They had real names, birthplaces, and stories of deportation that the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum itself had shared before. They had real faces captured in real surviving photographs, which were likely abused to generate the false images. 

In other words, someone, or some team of people online, was deepfaking the Holocaust.

As the Auschwitz museum wrote online:

“These are not real photos of the victims. They are digital inventions, often stylized or sanitized, that risk turning remembrance into fictionalized performance. The history of Auschwitz is a well-documented story. Altering its visual record with AI imagery introduces distortion, no matter the intent.”

Months later, the public found out what that intent was: money.

A BBC investigation found an international network of Facebook accounts posting AI-generated images to earn money from those images’ potential virality. It’s a problem sometimes referred to as “AI slop” but it comes with a major incentive. When accounts that make these kinds of images are invited to Facebook’s content monetization program, they can make $1,000 a month for posting anything that gets clicks.

And on Facebook, the BBC found, that means several accounts posting AI-generated images about the Holocaust. As the BBC reported:

“AI spammers have posted fake images purporting to be from inside [Auschwitz], such as a prisoner playing a violin or lovers meeting at the boundaries of fences—attracting tens of thousands of likes and shares.”

The economics of lying are concrete today. People can use AI to make fake images that make people feel good about terrible things or feel scared about untrue things, and they can make money until shut down by the Big Tech platforms themselves, which, in this case, only happened because of the BBC’s investigation. In fact, it’s that type of inaction from social media platforms that compelled the German government and multiple Holocaust memorial institutions to send an open letter earlier this year that asked for better controls and restrictions against this type of content.

As the signatories warned in their letter, the economic appeal for these accounts to distort history is too high a risk to allow. You can read the full letter here.

Today, on the Lock and Code podcast with host David Ruiz, we speak with Clara Mansfeld, a historian working on digital communications at one of the institutions signed onto the open letter—the Foundation of Hamburg Memorials and Learning Centers Commemorating the Victims of Nazi Crimes. In their conversation, Mansfeld discusses digital access to history, the manipulation of factual records through AI-generated imagery, and the threat that society faces when it becomes harder to evaluate the truth.

“What happens when the first thought we have with every historical image is, ‘Is that even real or is that AI?’ I don’t think we have really grasped what that means for us as a society.”

Tune in today to listen to the full conversation.

Show notes and credits:

Intro Music: “Spellbound” by Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
Outro Music: “Good God” by Wowa (unminus.com)

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Replace em dashes on any website. Pick your replacement character and see which sites overuse them the most.

Tired of writers who think a 2-em-dash sentence like this makes them sound smarter?

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174855

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Article URL: https://www.sfgate.com/tech/article/openai-san-francisco-headquarters-22259754.php

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Article URL: https://www.theverge.com/ai-artificial-intelligence/644853/pew-gallup-data-americans-dont-trust-ai

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Article URL: https://www.jpost.com/consumerism/article-888680

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Ok, so maybe "how to revive the internet" would be more accurate, but if you're reading this, I got your attention, right? Here's why I want you to read on: I built a free extension, D-slop, to disincentivize anyone from posting AI writing, and eventually images and video as well, on the internet.

For writing, it checks known vocab and punctuation tells, as well as subtler tells related to cadence, and assigns it a score subject to an adjustable threshold. If the text fails, users have the option to flag offending text, hide it, or block the page entirely (with the option to see anyway).

For media, it's admittedly fairly weak, as it relies on C2PA metadata which is stripped from all of the social media sites where it would be most helpful. (Anyone else have chronically online boomer parents continually gobbling up slop like it's real information?)

I have a D-slop+ version in the works that should be able to handle the media itself, but it's going to have to make API calls to have real teeth, which means I can't offer it for free. If this extension validates the concept, I'm happy to build it for y'all.

Yes, I vibe-coded it, but an ancillary bonus to the project accrued when it inspired me to cook dinner listening to Metallica's "Fight Fire with Fire," which in turn brought my 5 y/o running into the kitchen with every musical instrument in the house for an impromptu karaoke speed metal session.

It's MIT license open-source, full brief at https://github.com/jared-the-automator/d-slop; This forum is full of people smarter than me, so I'm open to suggestions.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174775

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Article URL: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/accessibility/windows/copilot/understand-updates-to-the-copilot-key-on-windows-devices

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Article URL: https://www.quantamagazine.org/rubin-tracks-skyscraper-size-asteroids-failed-supernovas-and-interstellar-visitors-20260515/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174755

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Article URL: https://omna.dev/

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Article URL: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.18964

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174746

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Article URL: https://techcrunch.com/2026/05/16/research-repository-arxiv-will-ban-authors-for-a-year-if-they-let-ai-do-all-the-work/

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Article URL: https://github.com/alplabai/signex

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174633

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Article URL: https://martin-baker.com/tie-club/

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Article URL: https://www.restaurantdive.com/news/yum-brands-nvidia-ai-taco-bell-pizza-hut-kfc-deal/742926/

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Article URL: https://github.com/pasc4le-ai-sandbox/pocket

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Article URL: https://imaginaryinstruments.org/

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Article URL: https://mailvaulty.com

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Article URL: https://en.liujiacai.net/2026/05/16/bun-rust-port/

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Article URL: https://blog.bridgexapi.io/behavior-reconstruction-vs-token-scanners

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174488

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Article URL: https://av-comparatives.org/independent-study-highlights-transparency-and-data-practices-in-leading-cybersecurity-products/

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48174478

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