History<\/a> and Esmetimetravels. Popular destinations include ancient Rome, Pompeii, the wild west and England during the Black Death.<\/p>\nThe creator of Chloe VS History, 32-year-old Jonathan Laramie, said the goal was to \u201cget younger people more interested\u201d in different periods of history.<\/p>\n
An AI-generated scene from ChloeVS History\u2019s YouTube video about the Titanic. Illustration: YouTube\/Chloe VS History<\/p>\n
\u201cHistory is a very visual experience, but it\u2019s just not taught that way,\u201d he said. \u201cIt\u2019s taught via a textbook. And that is not compatible with lots of students. So why not use the technology we have to bring that to life in a really visceral way?<\/p>\n
\u201cVlogs are very popular on YouTube because people get attached to a particular character. I\u2019m taking an already-proven format on YouTube and just applying it to history.\u201d<\/p>\n
While AI-generated historical videos have been circulating for the past year, Laramie said the sophistication of current AI video generation tools had \u201cabsolutely changed the game\u201d for content creation.<\/p>\n
\u201cI was just thinking: \u2018Wouldn\u2019t it be great to actually represent history with a kind of \u201creal person\u201d, who has time travelled to that point?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Laramie uses Seedance 2.0 to produce his videos, using historical sources, journal articles and contemporaneous drawings to refine the output.<\/p>\n
Even with this commitment to accuracy, Laramie said, there are occasional hiccups. \u201cFor example, in ancient Rome [videos], we\u2019ve had people wearing sunglasses or watches. The AI is trained on modern data, so when you\u2019re asking it to do historical stuff, there is a risk it\u2019s going to hallucinate.\u201d<\/p>\n
While the response has been overwhelmingly positive, Laramie said his content occasionally received the label of \u201cAI slop\u201d \u2013 referring to low-effort, mass-produced content generated by models.<\/p>\n
\u201cI totally get it,\u201d said Laramie. \u201cSome people just see it as really scary that AI can do this now. Some people see it as a threat. I think whatever you make with AI at this moment in time is going to be labelled AI slop by some people, because of the pure fact it\u2019s AI.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m trying to use it for purely positive reasons, and say: \u2018This is what you can do with it now, and isn\u2019t this great? We can actually stitch together our past and bring it to life so vividly.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
His first video to go viral was a 14-minute video of Chloe onboard the Titanic, which gained 4m views. \u201cI want to try to talk to the captain about the iceberg,\u201d Chloe tells the camera at the start of the episode. \u201cI feel like someone should at least try to say something. Wish me luck!\u201d<\/p>\n
On Friday, Laramie was presented with a World Influencers and Bloggers award (WIBA) in recognition of influencers and content creators at the Cannes festival for his work on the channel. \u201cI absolutely did not expect the success from it. I could not believe it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s a new form, it\u2019s brilliantly done, and I like the humour,\u201d said Adam Smith, a historian at Oxford University. He has seen Chloe VS History and other \u201ctime travel vloggers\u201d on his Instagram feed and believes the format could \u201cmassively enhance\u201d how history is taught to young people.<\/p>\n
\u201cIn one sense, there\u2019s absolutely nothing new about it,\u201d said Smith. \u201cThey\u2019re in a very long tradition. I put it in the same bracket as something like Horrible Histories, these things that popularise history and make it engaging and funny and immersive.<\/p>\n
Chloe VS History\u2019s AI-generated trip onboard RMS Titanic reaches its inevitable tragic conclusion. Illustration: YouTube\/Chloe VS History<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat these AI [videos] are doing is connecting with that visceral, tangible sense of: \u2018Oh my God, that could have been me, that was an earlier version of me.\u2019 It\u2019s quite a deep-seated psychological need in many people, to understand themselves in time.\u201d<\/p>\n
Smith suggested AI-generated video could be used to enhance historical documentaries and educational tools, visualising lesser known historical events and figures.<\/p>\n
\u201cRather than the really predictable things, like Vesuvius or the plague, maybe we could use that kind of technology and do new things with it,\u201d said Smith. \u201cCreative people could work really well with academic historians and people doing primary research \u2013 so not just regurgitating stuff, but really thinking and rethinking about the past.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cWays of presenting history always evolve. Remember when Ken Burns did his first documentary on the American civil war in the 1990s? Everyone was blown away by the fact he zoomed in and out of photographs.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s not as if Chloe videos are going to replace an academic monograph or a museum,\u201d said Smith. \u201cThey\u2019re doing slightly different things with different moods. So I think the potential is really, really exciting.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI have just arrived in Tudor London, 1536,\u201d a young woman in a green puffer jacket tells the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":604649,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-604648","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604648","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=604648"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/604648\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/604649"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=604648"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=604648"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=604648"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}