The Future Of History

The Future of History
By Lyndon (MemoryTech Blog)

I was scrolling late one night — that kind of half-attentive scroll where your thumb’s moving but your mind’s somewhere else — when an image made me stop.

A group of Black women, strong and stoic, stood in cowboy boots with a braid slipping out from under a wide-brimmed hats. Their eyes met the camera like she’d seen things. The caption said:
“Black Female Cowboy, 1800s.”

I stared for a moment, kind of mesmerised.
She felt real. Like a recovered ancestor. Like someone I might’ve missed in history class but always sensed was there.

But something didn’t sit right.
The texture of her skin was too perfect. The lighting too polished. I did some digging — no records, no photographer, no trace. Just a viral post.
Turns out she was AI-generated. A fabrication. A good-looking fiction.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

When the Past is Reinvented

We’re living in a time where AI can make history look real — even when it isn’t. Tools like Midjourney and DALL·E can generate images that feel like lost photographs. They look like recovered memory, but they’re really just prompt-engineered fantasy.

For communities like ours, where the archive has always had gaps, these kinds of images can feel comforting. They offer something that’s often been denied: presence. Proof. Representation.

But that comfort can come at a cost.
Because if we start replacing real absence with artificial presence, we’re not preserving memory. We’re rewriting it.

Beautiful Doesn’t Mean True

There’s a difference between restoring the past and inventing it.
And this is where things get tricky.

AI doesn’t care about historical accuracy. It cares about aesthetics. It gives us sepia-toned portraits that look like they belong in a museum, but don’t. They’re convincing, but not rooted. And in a time when disinformation already spreads faster than truth, that’s a problem.

Especially for Black history — where the real stories are already fragile.

Who Gets to Shape the Archive?

We’ve always had to fight to prove that we were there.
That we contributed. That our stories deserve to be remembered.

But now, anyone can generate a “Black cowboy from 1832” with no historical grounding. And people believe it. They share it. They build narratives around it. Before you know it, that fake image becomes more visible than the real ones — the blurry family photos, the oral histories, the handwritten notes in a box under someone’s bed.

That’s not just distortion. It’s a new kind of erasure.

Where I Stand

I’m not here to shut down AI.
I use it every day in my work — to restore, reimagine, support memory work with care.
But there’s a big difference between speculative restoration and unlabeled invention.

One asks questions.
The other makes assumptions.

If we’re going to use these tools to engage with history, we need to be clear about what we’re doing — and why. We owe that to the ancestors. And to the people coming after us, who will one day ask, “Was this real?”

Closing Thought

Not every powerful image is true.
And not every true image is powerful.

But history — real history — is worth protecting, even when it’s incomplete or uncomfortable. We don’t need perfect ancestors. We need remembered ones.

So the next time you see an AI-generated portrait claiming to be someone’s great-great-grandmother or long-lost rebel aunt, pause. Ask questions. Look for the source.

Because the future of history depends on what we choose to believe — and what we choose to protect.