Can future historians rely on records published today?
Stealth editing and AI may be distorting history for the future
Hello Everyone,
It’s been a while since I sent my last newsletter. I haven’t had much to update because I’ve been focusing on writing my next book. As of now, my plans are all in place for an October release. I will keep you all posted.
One thing I’m also doing is updating the covers for my spin-off stories. Here’s the new cover for Christmas Eve in the City of Dreams. You should’ve gotten a complimentary copy of this when you subscribed to my newsletter. It’s the story about Jesse Garland (from Rose of Anzio) on Christmas Eve, just before he reported for the draft. The old cover was illustrated. The new cover brought it to life.
Looking at the cover makes me want to watch Jesse in a movie.
Until next time,
Alexa Kang
Historical Preservation in the Digital World
I want to share with you some thoughts about the current rapid evolution of technology.
When I research history for my books, I scour the internet for WWII-related history books; old news articles and reports; memoirs, journals, diaries, and letters; photos, posters, flyers, and illustrated art; radio recordings, films, videos, and transcriptions; and military documents and records. I have it better than historical fiction authors writing stories of ancient times or pre-war periods, because WWII was one of the most well-documented war in history. The U.S. army had its own reporters, photographers, and videographers on the ground with the troops to record everything as they happened. Commercial news media also reported in print and on radio what was happening on the home front and in the various theaters. Soldiers took photos of what they saw, and wrote letters and diaries.
As I dive into these treasure troves of the past nearly a hundred years ago, one thing I can be sure of is that everything I read, watch, or listen to were exactly how they were recorded at the time they were written or published. They help me tremendously in reconstructing what events occurred, when the events happened, who were the people involved and what they did, the public opinions at the time, and how various individuals reacted to different developments. These historical records help me understanding the realities faced by those who lived through the era, so that I can accurately portray their world, to draw conclusions as to our past, and create endings to my stories for the better way forward.
I fear, though, that historical fiction writers a hundred years from now will not have the same access to the realities of the past if they want to write stories set in our time and beyond. More importantly, I wonder if historians in the future will be able to accurately learn, examine, and analyze our world and what comes after.
For some years now, news media outlets have been stealth-editing their news reports online. This practice is no longer a secret, has become a norm. (On the off chance that any of you are not aware of this, “stealth-editing” is when a news outlet edits an article online after publication without any notice to the readers.) The edit may be a factual correction, but it may also be a change or modification of the tone and narrative of the report, or even a rewrite of the report altogether. Whatever the case may be, news outlets rarely issue public corrections anymore when they edit published pieces. Because of this practice, readers of the same article from the same news source may be reading different content even in our current time, and come away with different impressions and understanding as to what had happened.
Stealth-editing online makes it impossible for us to examine past events to piece together what was known when, and how sources of information at a specific point in time led to certain historical decisions and public reactions.
Currently, there are a few recourses. One is print media, which can be physically stored. But print media is becoming obsolete. Many media outlets and journals today do not even publish print editions. The Internet Archive (Wayback Machine) preserves digital information published online, but the Internet Archive collect sinformation by its crawlers, which cannot access materials restricted by publishers. Individual readers can archive restricted materials (e.g. information behind paywalls), but that option depends on random individuals, and cannot cover all information published.
Recently, Artificial Intelligence has been making waves. I’ve known for some time already that AI has the ability to create realistic images of people who don’t exist. The technology is now available to the wider public. I have played around with it myself, and have seen amazing AI generated images created by many people no different from you and me except they are more skilled at writing prompts. On the one hand, I’m excited for this new development. Soon, I may be able to use AI to create images of fictional WWII characters for book covers. This will drastically lower my production cost, and could produce character images exactly as how I want them to be. On the other hand, I wonder how we will be able to discern anymore what is real and not real. How will we be able to ascertain that a photo or video is a capture of a real event or situation? I think about how, even after numerous eyewitness accounts, there are still people who deny the Holocaust ever happened. In the future, how will people be able to assert the truth with photo images as proof that something terrible (or good) actually happened?
What do you think about all this?
AI Generated Images
A lot of AI generated art I’ve seen are images of high fantasy and science fiction. Perhaps it’s natural that AI would attract people who are interested in these genres. At the moment, AI art still have some problems creating human features, especially hands. Below are some images of WWII era people my friend Cliffort and I made just for fun. We made all these from written prompts, which is pretty amazing. On closer look though, there are errors in details, and sometimes the human figures generated look unnatural. In the third picture, you can see the messed up hands.
But I expect the technology will improve to perfection very soon.
Indeed, WWII is the best documented war of all times. But the Holocaust deniers have a political agenda. It is not quite the stealth-editing going now.
When you see that the publishers want to rewrite Agatha Christie's books, and others, to make them politically correct, that society demands revisions in everything to be more inclusive, that is really frightening. I am fully in agreement to make everything more inclusive, but from now on, not what happened in the past. The next generations need to learn how things really were and how they changed. And hopefully don't repeat the same mistakes.
I have caught flack as a reviewer for the past five years because of this very subject, distorting History. I rate books based on non negotiable facts, I realize that fiction is escapism and hopefully entertaining in the bargain, but when an author decides to gallop so far outside the realms of what could have conceivably happened to ludicrous, I screech halt, an example; a proper young lady in 1800 walks by herself and knocks on a bachelor's door in broad daylight, and proceeds do whatever, that alone would have ruined her, and as liberal as the man can be, he would find her too fast to be his wife, so we have me on the Traditional side, and the crowd who thinks this could happen and HEA, now, throw AI into the mix, and what happens? The AI could have Waterloo being unkind to the French, ladies being prostitutes one minute and the next curtseying before the King, or Queen, the mind boggles at what can happen in the publishing world if AI has complete control, instead of the heroic Scarlett Pimpernel, the AI would justify the murders of innocent men, women, and children simply because they were wealthy, titled, or both. Yes, I agree with the Holocaust theory, AI would turn such a horrendous barbaric time in history as nothing more than a conspiracy by a group of political fanatics. Elon Musk is right about stopping AI. It is dangerous and needs to be stopped before it's genius is used for evil by evil men.
carolintallahassee