When AI travels through history: digital narratives, visual credibility, and epistemic injustice on the “Chloe VS History” channel

Abstract

The emergence of historical channels mediated by artificial intelligence (AI) on social media platforms constitutes an emerging communicative phenomenon that the academic literature in visual communication has not yet addressed in a systematic way. Chloe VS History, a YouTube and TikTok channel, offers a paradigmatic case of this new digital narrative. Based on three consolidated theoretical frameworks: the grammar of visual design by Kress and van Leeuwen, the gatekeeping theory by Shoemaker and Vos, and the concept of epistemic injustice by Fricker, the convergence construct of visual hyperrealism is proposed to name the simultaneous intersection of three conditions: the production of images of technical fidelity indistinguishable from a real record, a distribution environment without institutional verification mechanisms, and a good part of audiences without critical tools to evaluate that content. It is proposed that this convergence could generate a form of new epistemic risk that none of the three frameworks, in isolation, manages to fully capture, and that would help explain how a historical inaccuracy could be perceived as true without encountering any institutional or cognitive barrier. The central problem is not the use of AI in itself, nor the story as content, nor entertainment as a format, but its specific articulation in an ecosystem where visual credibility operates independently of factual fidelity. Ethical implications are derived for the individual production of historical content with AI and for the role of distribution platforms, and the analytical limits of the case are discussed in order to open an empirical research agenda in this emerging field.