A young woman in a green puffer jacket steps into Tudor London, 1536, and announces she is off to meet Henry VIII. On YouTube and Instagram, more than 610,000 followers watch her attempt eel pie at a market, explore first-class suites on the Titanic, and take a dip in an ancient Roman bath. She is Chloe, an AI-generated “history influencer”, and her videos have racked up 15 million views on YouTube alone. The format – part vlog, part time-travel fantasy – has been replicated by channels such as Janella Through Time, Nova VS History and Esmetimetravels, taking audiences to Pompeii, the wild west, and England during the Black Death. The phenomenon is growing rapidly, driven by increasingly sophisticated AI video tools that can stitch together the past with a convincing sense of immediacy.
The Creator’s Vision: Bringing History to Life, One Vlog at a Time
Behind Chloe VS History is Jonathan Laramy, a 32-year-old British creator who also runs Majestic Studios, which produces AI-generated historical documentaries. Laramy’s stated goal is to “get younger people more interested” in history. “History is a very visual experience, but it’s just not taught that way,” he said. “It’s taught via a textbook. And that is not compatible with lots of students. So why not use the technology we have to bring that to life in a really visceral way?” He took an already-proven YouTube format – the first-person vlog – and applied it to history, betting that audiences would become attached to a recurring character. “I was just thinking: ‘Wouldn’t it be great to actually represent history with a kind of “real person”, who has time travelled to that point?’”
The technology behind the channel is Seedance 2.0, a multi-modal AI video generation model that supports image, video, audio, and text inputs. Laramy emphasised that the sophistication of current tools has “absolutely changed the game” for content creation, allowing him to maintain visual consistency across frames and characters – a notorious challenge for earlier AI video models. To ensure some level of historical accuracy, he uses journal articles, primary sources, and contemporaneous drawings to refine the AI’s output. Even so, the AI can “hallucinate”. “For example, in ancient Rome [videos], we’ve had people wearing sunglasses or watches,” Laramy explained. “The AI is trained on modern data, so when you’re asking it to do historical stuff, there is a risk it’s going to hallucinate.”
Laramy’s first video to go viral was a 14-minute segment set aboard the Titanic, which gained 4 million views. In it, Chloe tells the camera she plans to talk to the captain about the iceberg. “I feel like someone should at least try to say something. Wish me luck!” The success took Laramy by surprise. Last Friday, he was presented with a World Influencers and Bloggers Award (WIBA) at the Cannes festival – a historic first for the ceremony, which officially recognised Chloe VS History as an AI-created influencer. “I absolutely did not expect the success from it. I could not believe it,” he said.
Not all feedback has been glowing. Some viewers label the content “AI slop”, a term for low-effort, mass-produced AI material. Laramy is philosophical. “I totally get it,” he said. “Some people just see it as really scary that AI can do this now. Some people see it as a threat. I think whatever you make with AI at this moment in time is going to be labelled AI slop by some people, because of the pure fact it’s AI. I’m trying to use it for purely positive reasons, and say: ‘This is what you can do with it now, and isn’t this great? We can actually stitch together our past and bring it to life so vividly.’”
Expert Views: A New Chapter in Popular History
Adam Smith, a historian at Oxford University, has seen Chloe VS History and other “time travel vloggers” appear on his Instagram feed. He describes the format as a modern iteration of a long tradition of popular history. “In one sense, there’s absolutely nothing new about it,” Smith said. “I put it in the same bracket as something like Horrible Histories, these things that popularise history and make it engaging and funny and immersive.” What the AI videos add, he argues, is a visceral, tangible sense of connection. “What these AI [videos] are doing is connecting with that visceral, tangible sense of: ‘Oh my God, that could have been me, that was an earlier version of me.’ It’s quite a deep-seated psychological need in many people, to understand themselves in time.”
Smith believes the format could “massively enhance” how history is taught to young people, and that AI-generated video could be used to visualise lesser-known historical events and figures. “Rather than the really predictable things, like Vesuvius or the plague, maybe we could use that kind of technology and do new things with it,” he suggested. “Creative people could work really well with academic historians and people doing primary research – so not just regurgitating stuff, but really thinking and rethinking about the past.” He draws a parallel to the evolution of documentary techniques: “Remember when Ken Burns did his first documentary on the American civil war in the 1990s? Everyone was blown away by the fact he zoomed in and out of photographs.”
However, the rise of AI-generated history content also raises concerns among some historians about accuracy, bias, and the risk of inventing fake events or citations. The potential for AI to repeat prejudiced narratives, flatten complex stories, or produce deepfakes that could influence public opinion is a recognised danger. Some creators acknowledge that their videos are more “artistic interpretations” than strict documentaries. The Archival Producers Alliance has released guidelines on the use of generative AI in documentary filmmaking, emphasising accuracy, transparency, and legal considerations. Yet Smith remains optimistic about the potential for collaboration. “It’s not as if Chloe videos are going to replace an academic monograph or a museum,” he said. “They’re doing slightly different things with different moods. So I think the potential is really, really exciting.”
