FunkoChan

ALT In the future, historians will attempt to authenticate digital media just as they do now: by tracking down its provenance and building a historical context around its earliest appearances in the historical record. They can compare versions across platforms and attempt to trace its origin point. But if the past is any indication, our online archives might not survive long enough to provide the historical context necessary to allow future historians to authenticate digital artifacts of our present era. Currently the historical integrity of our online cultural spaces is atrocious. Culturally important websites disappear, blog archives break, social media sites reset, online services shut down, and comments sections that include historically valuable reactions to events vanish without warning.

ALT Today much of the historical context of our recent digital history is held together tenuously by volunteer archivists and the nonprofit Internet Archive, although increasingly universities and libraries are joining the effort. Without the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, for example, we would have almost no record of the early web. Yet even with the Wayback Machine’s wide reach, many sites and social media posts have slipped through the cracks, leaving potential blind spots where synthetic media can attempt to fill in the blanks. The Peril of historical context attacks If these weaknesses in our digital archives persist into the future, it’s possible that forgers will soon attempt to generate new historical context using AI tools, thereby justifying falsified digital artifacts.