The full text of the post is AI-generated slop, mixing up some historical myths (the "children of the sun" story) with the kind of weepy sermonizing that is meant to be pro-Indian but can also come off as patronizing and racist in its own way.
The American Indian Heroes account is one of maybe dozens of similar accounts pushing AI-generated click bait including fake images, that have flooded social media in the last year or two. I was about to scroll on when I stopped to look at the image again. I am always interested in new sources of historic photos of local History, and I had not seen this one before. It did not look exactly like an AI image, but it also did not look right somehow. So I poked around a little, using the Google Lens tool built into my phone.
An image search showed that this photo has been shared many times on Facebook, but identified with different tribes, including the Spokanes, Flatheads, Apaches, and others. Way down in the search results I found exactly one hit that was not Facebook, and that was this Pinterest post:
Ah, Pinterest, where citation goes to die. The only metadata is in the caption: "Spokane group - 1899." Clearly this is the same family group as in the Facebook post, but look at the backgroud--insteead of the sweeping visit of the Facebook post, the original photo on Pinterest has the family sitting in their yard, with a less stereotypically Indian white picket fence. This has to be the original--but how to find its source?
I put this photo into a Google image search and got a lot more terrible Facebook pages, but also this version of the photo from the "Flathead Indian Reservation History" Facebook group:
Also a comment on the post from a descendent of the pictured family, identifying some of the individuals in the photo:
So that's cool.
And there the trail runs out for me, at least for now. Clearly the second photo is the original, which is out there somewhere, and the third is a version of that published somewhere in a promotional volume for the railroad. I would love to know more about the photo and the name of the book!
As I wrote this, the initial post with the AI text and manipulated photo has been shared 179 times. By the end of the week that number could well be in the thousands.
As someone who teaches local history, where information is often scarce, this flood of AI bullshit is worrisome. Increasingly when I ask my students to research some local topic they find this kind of AI bullshit, some of it obvious, some less so. And the bullshit is spreading at a far faster rate than truthful information. In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote that "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it."
Enshittification is nothing new.
As I wrote this, the initial post with the AI text and manipulated photo has been shared 179 times. By the end of the week that number could well be in the thousands.
As someone who teaches local history, where information is often scarce, this flood of AI bullshit is worrisome. Increasingly when I ask my students to research some local topic they find this kind of AI bullshit, some of it obvious, some less so. And the bullshit is spreading at a far faster rate than truthful information. In 1710, Jonathan Swift wrote that "Falsehood flies, and the truth comes limping after it."
Enshittification is nothing new.
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