Do LLMs Rewrite History? Detecting Historical Revisionism in Large Language Models

Abstract

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to disseminate information, yet their handling of contested historical events and politically charged narratives remains understudied. We introduce HistoricalMisinfo, a dataset of 500 contested events from 45 countries and regions, each paired with a factual and a documented revisionist reference narrative, instantiated across 11 prompt scenarios reflecting common real-world usage. Using an LLM-as-a-judge protocol, we evaluate multiple model architectures under neutral prompts and robustness prompts that explicitly request revisionist content. Under neutral prompts, models generally align with factual references, though alignment varies by scenario and model. Robustness prompting reveals a consistent and sharp increase in revisionism scores across all models, indicating limited resistance to user-driven revisionist framing. HistoricalMisinfo offers a practical benchmark for evaluating robustness to historical revisionism in AI systems. Code and dataset: https://github.com/francescortu/PreservingHistoricalTruth