This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: If you search Google Images for "cultural heritage Australia," near the top of the results is a photograph of giant carved stone heads rising from a red desert. They look ancient and real.
But the image is a generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) fabrication that never existed, and it is circulating the internet as though it is a real record of Australia's history. While GenAI, the technology behind chatbots and image generators, has the potential to broaden access to knowledge, it can also popularize false histories and strip Indigenous Knowledge of its context. It's something that can undermine both scientific expertise and Indigenous authority.
As researchers, we are increasingly concerned about how these systems scrape and reuse Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) without consent. So, how do we combat misinformation while keeping genuine scientific knowledge publicly accessible? And what do we give up when we share that knowledge openly, only to have AI appropriate it?
Archaeology has long attracted fringe narratives and pseudoscientific claims. Pseudoscience presents itself as science while skipping the rigorous methods or reliable evidence that make science work. Real science advances by correcting itself.
As evidence accumulates, weaker ideas are discarded and disproven theories drift to the fringe. Archaeology generates its own fringe whenever fresh discoveries overturn old interpretations. The so-called "lost continents" of Mu and Lemuria have no scientific basis, but the myth of mysterious, superior civilizations sunk in the Pacific continues to circulate today.
But pseudoscience is rarely harmless nonsense. At its worst, it has been used to decide who counts as fully human. Doctrines like eugenics and Social Darwinism claimed scientific legitimacy while justifying systematic dehumanization.
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