A Mother's Promise and The Theft of Authenticity

Prince William with Renee Salt at the Western Marble Arch Synagogue in London last year

TOBY MELVILLE/POOL/AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES

This recent story involving Holocaust survivor Renee Salt's memoir has deeply troubled me as an AI advocate.

In early 2025, shortly after the 95-year-old survivor published her Holocaust memoir "A Mother's Promise," AI was used to create unauthorized rewritten versions that appeared for sale on major platforms.

As UX professionals, we face a critical ethical challenge: How do we prevent technology designed to assist creativity from becoming tools for exploitation and harm? This incident represents what the original author's co-writer called "creative leeching", using AI not for original creation but to extract value from others' intellectual and emotional labor.

The implications for our field are profound. We must design ethical guardrails into AI systems that can detect potential intellectual property theft. We must advocate for better platform verification processes and create transparent systems identifying AI-generated or modified content.

Most importantly, we must design with empathy, remembering that real human beings are behind every piece of content. How would Renee Salt interact with a system designed to protect her work? What would the reporting process look like for someone of her age?

As AI becomes further embedded in creative processes, we UX designers have a crucial responsibility to ensure these systems enhance rather than undermine human creativity, dignity, and historical truth. The accurate measure of AI's value isn't just what it can produce, but what values it protects.

Have you encountered similar ethical challenges in your design work? How are you addressing them?

https://www.thetimes.com/uk/technology-uk/article/ai-book-thieves-copy-holocaust-survivors-memoir-96m0wp603?region=global

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