"POV: You Wake Up <On Historical Day>" AI-Generated Videos
Where’s the line between immersive educational storytelling and exploitative spectacle?
What’s going on?
“You wake up as a teenager in 1980s America.” “You wake up during the black plague (1351).” “You wake up in Auschwitz in 1944.”
From evoking nostalgic vibes to the plain sensationalist, AI-generated “historical POV” videos are gaining traction on TikTok. Churned out by dedicated accounts with names like CHron0.VIew and Time Traveller POV, they blend the familiar immersive tropes of social storytelling with the shock value of historical tragedies (and some normal day to day ones).
What’s driving it?
These videos tap into the best parts of TikTok (curiosity, spreading fresh knowledge in new ways) but also the worst (shock value), driving exactly the kind of engagement that algorithms reward with further reach.
What does it mean?
In theory, these historical POV videos have the potential to engage especially younger people with history. But in practice, they highlight what context collapse looks like: distorting facts, commodifying trauma for engagement, and turning actual human tragedies into bite-sized entertainment.
But we can’t just ignore or condemn it: AI-driven historical content evolved faster than we were able to regulate it. But in its current form, it does a disservice to the memory of those who suffered as well as the audiences being fed distorted facts.
Final takeaway
The popularity of these videos shows a clear demand for immersive first-person historical storytelling. This is where historians, educators, and institutions need to step in to provide context, fact-check AI-driven narratives, and set standards for how history is represented in digital spaces – all so that we can let historical truth (and not engagement metrics) decide how the past is presented.