Blurring the lines between reality and fiction
The danger of projects like The Founders Museum, according to Brendan Gillis, director of teaching and learning for the American Historical Association, is that it focuses narrowly on a small set of experiences, making it seem like this is all the American Revolutionary history that we need to know. But, he says, "there's many, many more people who shaped the American Revolution and kept this story going."
One concern is how AI-generated videos can sometimes blur the line between reality and fiction. In one video, an artificially generated John Adams says, "Facts do not care about your feelings" — a phrase often used by conservative commentator and PragerU presenter Ben Shapiro.
"I have real concerns about the extent to which they weave together words that are preserved in primary sources from historical figures with other sort of commentary," Gillis explains. "And it's not always clear [when] the historical figures actually said the words that are coming out of their mouth, or wrote them down, and when this is the work of whoever scripted them."
"Viewers should understand that the portrayals are careful interpretations — grounded in letters, speeches, and original writings from the period," Streit said in response to concerns about the videos' sourcing.
Other videos from the exhibit appear to gloss over key aspects of figures' lives, leading to what can feel like broad strokes of history. Karin Wulf, a history professor at Brown University, points to Revolutionary writer and thinker Mercy Otis Warren as an example.
"In the video, it acknowledges that she's a writer, and that writing wasn't something that women were encouraged to do, certainly in public," Wulf says. "But it then has her say these kind of pablum pieces about patriotism and liberty that are so much less stringent and so much less potent than what she actually said at the time."
Warren was infamously critical of the founders, writing in her observations of the 1787 Philadelphia Convention, "America has, in many instances, resembled the conduct of a restless, vigorous, luxurious youth, prematurely emancipated from the authority of a parent, but without the experience necessary to direct him to act with dignity or discretion."
"Give us five minutes, and we'll give you a semester"
PragerU was founded by longtime conservative radio host Dennis Prager and his then-producer Allen Estrin in 2009 to promote conservative values through courses taught in five-minute videos.