Slop AI history pages are ruining the internet with bad history, including inaccurate historical dress. Let's learn how to spot AI pseudohistory and fake content through fashion history, and why we shouldn't be letting artificial intelligence create pictures of history without better fact checking.

I hear so often that AI ruined the internet, and I got so cross with artificial intelligence filling my social media with fake history that I had to fact check these for historical misinformation. Fake news is sadly nothing new, we're constantly having to ask ourselves 'is this image real?', and more and more media literacy is necessary in the face of dead internet theory. But what does zombie internet theory have to do with historical costuming? This fake content can be identified by the inaccurate historical dress-- it's not like ChatGPT can tell the difference, but I can.

These slop history pages follow the same format : A myth or fact that's usually pseudohistory about a certain historical figure, like the medieval pirate Jeanne de Clisson or Viking women warriors. There's an image with it to illustrate the factoid, but the clothes never match the historical period they're meant to show! Instead of wearing a medieval dress, Jeanne de Clisson was in a bad pirate Halloween costume! And the Viking shieldmaidens were dressed in nothing like traditional Viking clothing, which I've researched and reproduced before.

The problem with these pages isn't just bad historical costumes : plenty of period dramas choose not to have historically accurate clothes, and that's fine! It's that these slop pages are spreading historical misinformation by pretending to be educational. It's bad history, and even a little fact checking turns up that Revolutionary War spy Lydia Darragh wasn't the young woman in frilly dresses shown by generative AI. She was older, in her late forties, and a Quaker who dressed plainly! This is a misuse of technology, and it's why we keep hearing that AI ruined the internet.

So what can we do about artificial intelligence and the zombie internet? It's important to learn how to spot AI and be diligent about fact checking to spot slop and misinformation. Dress history and knowing what historical clothes look like is an aspect of media literacy that helps easily spot AI images and tell if an image is real. I hope watching how a fashion historian reacts to artificial intelligence helps you get better at your fact checking and fight dead internet theory.

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