Australian Holocaust survivors turned into AI clickbait

Facebook spammers are rewriting history, posting mock photos of Australian Holocaust survivors to drive clicks and make money.

The images purport to be authentic photographs of people sent to concentration camps but are actually fakes created using artificial intelligence.

One of the Australian survivors whose story is being used to perpetrate the scam, Peter Kraus, says those responsible are simply trying to ''cash in'' on the memory of the Holocaust.

Dr Kraus narrowly avoided being sent to Auschwitz as a child and was instead deported with his family to a Nazi labour camp in Austria.

After escaping confinement with his mother, he emigrated to Australia in 1948 and wrote about his family's ordeal in the 2020 memoir Slow Train to Auschwitz.

When the Nazis marched on the Sudetenland two years later, on their way to full invasion in 1939, it asserts he ''was deported to Theresienstadt, then to Auschwitz''.

The post also includes a vintage-looking head-shot purporting to show Dr Kraus as an eight-year-old.

However the retired obstetrician, who now lives in Queensland, says the narrative contains multiple factual errors and the person depicted in the image bears little resemblance to how he looked as a child.

''The photograph is not of me,'' he told an AAP FactCheck investigation.

''I was not born in 1936 … I wasn't born in Czechoslovakia … I did not go to Auschwitz.

''It all sounds like a legitimate story but it isn't; it is made up but not totally.''

Meta's AI verification tool confirms the image professing to show him as a child was created using AI.

AAP FactCheck found dozens of posts retelling the stories of Australian Holocaust survivors using AI-generated photos.

Meta's page transparency feature reveals the fake posts are being shared by a network of spam Facebook accounts operated out of Pakistan.