Education Secretary Linda McMahon baffled historians on Friday after highlighting civil rights icon Ida B. Wells in a social media post using an image created with generative artificial intelligence, an image experts decried as “historically inaccurate,” The Washington Post reported Saturday.
“The use of AI to pull together infographics about individuals has resulted in poor quality and inconsistent resources in education,” said Sarah Weicksel, executive director of the American Historical Association, speaking with the Post.
“The AI images are pulling from material that is historically inaccurate. We have excellent sources for all of these women, so there is no point to using something that is AI generated.”
Shared on President Donald Trump’s social media platform Truth Social, McMahon highlighted Wells – one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People who extensively documented lynchings of Black Americans – as part of her agency’s efforts to highlight American women throughout history. The image she shared with the post had several historical inaccuracies, however, as noted by Weicksel.
“[Weicksel] pointed out that on McMahon’s post, the woman in the image is depicted as writing by a candle with a quill pen, though gas lights and metal dip pens were more common when Wells was at the peak of her career as a writer and activist in the late 1800s and early 1900s,” the Post’s report reads.
Paula Giddings, the author of a 2008 biography on Wells, argued that beyond the historical inaccuracies depicted in the AI-generated image, the use of AI was also contradictory to what the civil rights icon stood for.
“While I appreciated the recognition of Ida B. Wells, the decision to use an AI generated image undermines the very values she stood for: truth-telling and her lifelong campaign against false representations,” Giddings told the Post. “To use a fabricated image — even a respectful one — is not only unnecessary but is evidence that the secretary of education misreads [Wells’s] legacy.”