RECOMMENDED: What Altering Historical Images Can Teach Us About History

Perspectives on History, the newsmagazine of the American Historical Association (AHA), has published an article, “What Altering Historical Images Can Teach Us About History” by Mary D. Lewis (Harvard University). Lewis’s piece discusses generative AI, noting that the August 2025 Guiding Principles for Artificial Intelligence in History Education included an “appended chart suggesting that students could ‘ask generative AI to produce a historical image for a paper or presentation.'” Lewis expressed shock, noting that “AI cannot produce historical images, only simulations thereof.”

Instead of asking her students to use generative AI to create “simulations” of historical images, Lewis created an assignment for her modern French history course that focused on encouraging critical thinking about the nature of images and media:

Rather than “produce a historical image,” which would be ahistorical, I want students to think about the historicity of real historical images and to reflect on how easily they can be manipulated. Concerned with the alteration of images I had seen on social media, I created an assignment in a fall 2024 lecture course that instructed students to modify a real historical image and then reflect on how manipulating it affected their understanding of the original image.

While this assignment did not use generative AI in the iteration discussed in this piece, Lewis expects that more students will choose to use AI tools as she reuses this assignment in future. As Lewis explains, while her students didn’t create historical images, “They manipulated one. And learned much more about history—and dare I say about the pitfalls of simulation—by analyzing that manipulation.”