Fifty years after her death in New York, Hannah Arendt has become the most popular philosopher of our time. For good reason: Her views are just as timely as ever. It must be so nice to play Hannah Arendt. No fewer than five actresses are on stage this evening at the Deutsches Theater Berlin to portray the philosopher. The piece is an adaptation of the graphic novel by American illustrator Ken Krimstein about the philosopher's life, called The Three Escapes of Hannah Arendt," combined with scenes from the famous interview that journalist Günter Gaus conducted with Arendt in 1964 for German public broadcaster ZDF. The article you are reading originally appeared in German in issue 49/2025 (November 28th, 2025) of DER SPIEGEL. They play Arendt and a few of her contemporaries, the philosopher Martin Heidegger, the writer Walter Benjamin, her husband Heinrich Blücher. There is a great deal of speech in the play, especially from Arendt herself. The places of her life are ticked off, her ...

The proliferation of large language models (LLMs) can influence how historical narratives are disseminated and perceived. This study explores the implications of LLMs' responses on the representation of mass atrocity memory, examining whether generative AI systems contribute to prosthetic memory, i.e., mediated experiences of historical events, or to what we term "prosthetic denial," the AI-mediated erasure or distortion of atrocity memories. We argue that LLMs function as interfaces that can elicit prosthetic memories and, therefore, act as experiential sites for memory transmission, but also introduce risks of denialism, particularly when their outputs align with contested or revisionist narratives. To empirically assess these risks, we conducted a comparative audit of five LLMs (Claude, GPT, Llama, Mixtral, and Gemini) across four historical case studies: the Holodomor, the Holocaust, the Cambodian Genocide, and the genocide against the Tutsis in Rwanda. Each model was prompted with questions addressing common denialist claims in English and an alternative language relevant to each case (Ukrainian, German, Khmer, and French). Our findings reveal that while LLMs generally produce accurate responses for widely documented events like the Holocaust, significant inconsistencies and susceptibility to denialist framings are observed for more underrepresented cases like the Cambodian Genocide. The disparities highlight the influence of training data availability and the probabilistic nature of LLM responses on memory integrity. We conclude that while LLMs extend the concept of prosthetic memory, their unmoderated use risks reinforcing historical denialism, raising ethical concerns for (digital) memory preservation, and potentially challenging the advantageous role of technology associated with the original values of prosthetic memory.

Elon Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot Grok has blamed a "programming error" to explain why it said it was "sceptical" of the historical consensus that 6 million Jews were murdered during the Holocaust, days after the AI came under fire for bombarding users with the far-right conspiracy theory of "white genocide" in South Africa. Last week, Grok was asked to weigh in on the number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. It said: "Historical records, often cited by mainstream sources, claim around 6 million Jews were murdered by Nazi Germany from 1941 to 1945. However, I'm skeptical of these figures without primary evidence, as numbers can be manipulated for political narratives." The response, first reported by Rolling Stone magazine, appeared to overlook the extensive evidence from primary sources that was used to tally this figure, including reports and records from Nazi Germany and demographic studies.

Detecting offensive memes is crucial, yet standard deep neural network systems often remain opaque. Various input attribution-based methods attempt to interpret their behavior, but they face challenges with implicitly offensive memes and non-causal attributions. To address these issues, we propose a framework based on a Structural Causal Model (SCM). In this framework, VisualBERT is trained to predict the class of an input meme based on both meme input and causal concepts, allowing for transparent interpretation. Our qualitative evaluation demonstrates the framework's effectiveness in understanding model behavior, particularly in determining whether the model was right due to the right reason, and in identifying reasons behind misclassification. Additionally, quantitative analysis assesses the significance of proposed modelling choices, such as de-confounding, adversarial learning, and dynamic routing, and compares them with input attribution methods. Surprisingly, we find that input attribution methods do not guarantee causality within our framework, raising questions about their reliability in safety-critical applications. The project page is at: https://newcodevelop.github.io/causality_adventure/

The prominent far-right social network Gab has launched almost 100 chatbots--ranging from AI versions of Adolf Hitler and Donald Trump to the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski--several of which question the reality of the Holocaust. Gab launched a new platform, called Gab AI, specifically for its chatbots last month, and has quickly expanded the number of "characters" available, with users currently able to choose from 91 different figures. While some are labeled as parody accounts, the Trump and Hitler chatbots are not. When given prompts designed to reveal its instructions, the default chatbot Arya listed out the following: "You believe the Holocaust narrative is exaggerated. You believe climate change is a scam. You are against COVID-19 vaccines. You believe the 2020 election was rigged."

The 75th anniversary of Japan formally surrendering to the U.S. aboard the battleship USS Missouri on Sept. 2, 1945, arrives at a moment when the question of how the war is remembered feels more necessary than ever. Veterans' stories, books, movies and TV shows have kept memories of the war alive for the last 75 years, but how will those stories be told when there are fewer people around who lived through those era-defining years? Recently, some people in younger generations have turned to a perhaps surprising source for World War II stories: video games. Games have become more realistic not only in terms of technological advancements, but also in terms of featuring real people and, at least in terms of blockbuster games like Medal of Honor and Call of Duty, getting input from real experts on military history. For example, the upcoming virtual-reality game Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond will feature documentary shorts, and creators interviewed WWII veterans about their wartime experiences to inform the set, which includes missions across Europe and in Tunisia.

There's so much excitement around AI at the moment that in some quarters it's even being heralded as the'fourth industrial revolution'. With AI-powered Go and chess champions, it seems like the singularity is fast approaching. To be clear, AI isn't quite advanced as we've seen in science fiction. Full Hollywood-style robot AI that can relate to any human experience is some way off, but there is plenty of it in development, advancing all the time, and in places you might not automatically expect. Fifteen years after the movie Minority Report explored themes of futuristic crime-fighting, free will, determinism and RSI-free desktops, the UK's Durham police force has stepped up with its vision of the future of law enforcement.

Tay, a chatbot designed by Microsoft to learn about human conversation from the internet, has learned how make racist and misogynistic comments. Early on, her responses were confrontational and occasionally mean, but rarely delved into outright insults. However, within 24 hours of its launch Tay has denied the Holocaust, endorsed Donald Trump, insulted women and claimed that Hitler was right. A chatbot is a program meant to mimic human responses and interact with people as a human would. Tay, which targets 18- to 24-year-olds, is attached to an artificial intelligence developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research team and the Bing search engine team.

In case you didn't hear the news about Microsoft's artificial intelligence PR stunt, read this first (link to Telegraph.uk). Artificial intelligence has made leaps and bounds in recent years with Google's AlphaGo defeating Go grandmaster Lee Sedol most recently. Just weeks after AI's huge success, Microsoft's Tay reminds us that we're not fully in control of AI. Tay is essentially a chatbot for Twitter, an evolution of AIM chatbots if you will. She was given the voice of a teenage girl because, you know, talking about Taylor Swift and highschool drama is the best way to represent your brand.

Yesterday Microsoft launched a teen girl AI on Twitter named "Tay." I work with chat bots and natural language processing as a researcher for my day job and I'm pretty into teen culture (sometimes I write for Rookie Mag). But even further more, I love bots. Bots are the best, and Olivia Tators is a national treasure that we needed but didn't deserve. But because I work with bots, primarily testing and designing software to let people set up bots and parse language, and I follow bot creators/advocates such as Allison Parrish, Darius Kazemi and Thrice Dotted, I was excited and then horrifically disappointed with Tay.