31/07/2026
THE CORRUPTION OF HISTORICAL TRUTH IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
It is deeply troubling to see what has been happening on the Internet in recent years. Enormous quantities of documents, images, and handwritten manuscripts are being published without adequate verification of their historical authenticity or of the accuracy of the information accompanying them.
“An article about Codex Leicester, shows instead a page from another manuscript.”
This is a perfect example. The image being circulated is indeed a manuscript page by Leonardo da Vinci, but it has been incorrectly identified. The page shown does not belong to the Codex Leicester. It is folio 55 verso of Leonardo da Vinci’s Manuscript B.
At first sight, this may appear to be a minor and almost insignificant mistake. In reality, however, it represents one of the most serious dangers facing us today, and an even greater danger for the future, because of the combined influence of social media and artificial intelligence.
A small degree of ignorance, carelessness, or imprecision in the publication of apparently harmless information can cause enormous damage to the knowledge inherited by future generations.
An article of this kind may appear credible, interesting, and well presented. It therefore becomes a reference, a “document” that students and readers who do not possess specialist knowledge of Leonardo’s manuscripts, and this means approximately 99.99% of the population, will naturally accept as accurate and plausible.
Once this incorrect information begins circulating on social media and across the Internet, it may also be collected and absorbed into the datasets used to train artificial intelligence systems. As a result, this page could gradually become identified as a page from the Codex Leicester, even though that attribution is historically false.
This is how a simple error can be transformed into a false historical fact.
Artificial intelligence, and increasingly the future of human knowledge, will depend upon information gathered from the Internet. What today appears to be a trivial mistake may therefore become tomorrow’s accepted historical truth.
In the future, our children will, for better or worse, base much of their knowledge of history on what artificial intelligence tells them. But if artificial intelligence has learned from inaccurate articles, incorrectly labelled images, and superficially researched documents, it will inevitably reproduce a distorted version of historical truth.
The future may be technologically extraordinary, but it will still be compromised if the knowledge upon which it is built is historically inaccurate.
I noticed this particular mistake because I know Leonardo da Vinci and his manuscripts extremely well. However, it is obvious that the same problem applies to every field of human knowledge.
Inaccuracy, carelessness, superficial research, and the ease with which unverified information is published are not minor imperfections. They represent an enormous threat to the future of human knowledge, a future in which what is widely repeated may eventually replace what is actually true.
Mario Taddei
Leonardo da Vinci Academy
www.mariotaddei.net
www.davinciacademy.net
