SURVIVOR TESTIMONIES IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: ETHICAL, LEGAL, AND TECHNICAL BOUNDARIES OF DIGITAL REPRESENTATION
SURVIVOR TESTIMONIES IN THE AGE OF ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: ETHICAL, LEGAL, AND TECHNICAL BOUNDARIES OF DIGITAL REPRESENTATION

Summary/Abstract: This paper examines the ethical, legal, and technical conditions under which artificial intelligence may be used to interpret collective testimonies of victims of genocide, concentration camps, and wartime atrocities. The central issue concerns the capacity of digital systems to represent historical experiences accurately without compromising the dignity of victims, generating fabricated statements, or facilitating revisionist misuse. The analytical framework distinguishes between AI models that emulate or simulate the testimonies of real individuals and systems that employ fictional composite narrators grounded in verified archival material and transparent provenance. Within this conceptual context, the paper presents the author’s pilot project Great School Class, a chatbot designed as a fictional schoolboy narrator inspired by historically documented experiences of children executed in Kragujevac in October, 1941. The system employs retrieval-based access to verified historical sources combined with constrained generative methods to maintain contextual accuracy and prevent the fabrication of testimony. The chatbot is currently under development and serves as a pilot environment for examining the possibilities and limitations of fictional digital narrators in representing historical contexts. It was first tested in a controlled setting at the Kralj Petar I Karađorđević Elementary School in Kragujevac. The broader significance of this approach lies in pedagogical, museological, and public-history practices, where interactive digital systems increasingly mediate collective memory. The paper proposes a framework for the transparent, ethically responsible, and methodologically grounded use of fictional digital narrators, highlighting their potential to enhance engagement while acknowledging the risks of narrative distortion and misinterpretation.

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