- 16 hours ago
AI slop is littering your feed and spreading misinformation, so WIRED’s here to set the record straight. Join Professor & Historian of Witchcraft & Demonology Mikki Brock as we fact check the internet, Witchcraft edition.
Category
🤖
TechTranscript
00:00Did you know the witch on your Halloween decorations might actually be a portrait of a
00:03medieval businesswoman? No, it's not. I don't know what the green gas is. This is the worst
00:08thing I've seen in any of these videos so far, and I need a timeline and algorithm cleanse
00:13immediately. I'm Mickey Brock, professor and historian of witchcraft and demonology.
00:18Let's fact check some AI slop.
00:24Did you know the witch on your Halloween decorations might actually be a portrait
00:28of a medieval businesswoman? No, it's not. Here's why that matters. For hundreds of
00:33years, women called alewives ran the beer industry across Europe. Now that's true. Women have always
00:39been involved in the brewing industry and were really important to the production of ale, which
00:44is what a lot of people drank in the period, given that water was often contaminated, not safe to
00:48drink. Beer was big business, and women were deeply involved in that. They wore tall pointed hats. There
00:54is no evidence that the vast majority of alewives wore any certain hat. That is a fiction.
01:00So customers could spot them in crowded markets. They stirred giant cauldrons of brewing ale.
01:05Beer could be brewed in lots of things, not just cauldrons. It could be brewed in a sort of regular
01:10giant saucepan that people might use. It could be brewed in water buckets. It was not always being
01:16brewed in cauldrons. And also, I have to add, in the witch trial records, cauldrons are actually rarely
01:22mentioned explicitly, even though various domestic instruments of cooking and other things do show
01:27up. They kept cats to protect their grain from mice. A lot of people kept pets. A lot of people
01:32kept cats and dogs and other animals. But cats were associated with heresy and the demonic long before
01:41you have the sort of heyday of the alewife and long before the witch trials themselves too. So cats have
01:47this demonic association completely outside of the fact that they were owned by these brewers.
01:52But I do enjoy the fact that this is very clearly playing on the black cat stereotype. That's an old
01:57one. When a fresh batch was ready, they hung a broom outside the door as a signal. Here's the thing
02:03about
02:03brooms. They have become one of these stock items that we associate with witchcraft. Walk down any street
02:09in Halloween, you see them on front porches and so on. But witches were believed to fly to demonic sabbaths
02:16on lots of different objects, right? They could fly in a broom, but actually that doesn't show up as
02:21much as you would expect in the British records from England or Scotland. It's much more of a
02:26continental European idea. But people imagined that witches flew on pitchforks or sticks or rode animals,
02:33goats, other creatures, or just flew lifted by the devil's wind itself. So brooms have stuck around,
02:41and I think they've stuck around because they are an object associated with domesticity,
02:45and women were seen to occupy the sphere of the home during this period. So that connection
02:50between women and witchcraft is why the broom is so dominant in our imagination. But it has
02:54nothing to do with alewives, and there are lots of other ways that people could get to these demonic
02:59parties. Enough of that.
03:01So I just arrived in Salem, Massachusetts, 1692, and honestly, it's not as bad as I think.
03:07Which is gold! Gold would have been something surprising to see an ordinary person walking around
03:12the streets with in the context of Salem. But it's not because people thought gold
03:16or jewelry was demonic. It's because it was expensive, and because they thought it was
03:22a sign of vanity, a sign that you were devoting your attention in the world to something ungodly.
03:27She bears the devil's mark!
03:29The other thing about this is that immediately this guy sees the necklace and says,
03:33it's the devil's mark. That is not how devil's marks worked. People certainly believed in this
03:38period that when a witch made a pact with the devil, she was marked in some way as his servant.
03:44It's kind of an inversion of the baptism ritual. But the devil's mark was something people searched
03:49for. It's certainly the case that in the Salem witch hunts accused people were stripped and searched
03:54for an insensible mark, a strange mark, a discolored mark that could be seen as evidence
04:00that they had engaged in a deal with the devil.
04:03Okay. Okay. The jewelry was a bad call. The jewelry was a really bad call.
04:06So this building right here, this is where it all started.
04:09It didn't start here. It started in the home of Samuel Parris because it was his daughter Betty
04:13and his niece Abigail who were the first girls to display signs of bewitchment. And the minister,
04:20Samuel Parris, didn't immediately say, oh my gosh, these kids, they are clearly taken with the devil or
04:26witchcraft. What he did first was call a doctor to say, hey, can we explain this by some other means?
04:32And when the doctor couldn't figure out what was going on with these bewitched girls who were having
04:36fit strange contortions, saying strange things, that's when people started to strongly suspect
04:41witchcraft. And once the accusation started, they didn't stop. Over 200 people were accused, 200.
04:46Most of them were just women who didn't fit in. It is true that most of those accused in Salem
04:51were just ordinary people. And most of them were women. But Salem is unusual. A lot of the women
04:58who do get accused in Salem as the trials progress, they actually do fit in. They actually are upstanding
05:04citizens. It's only early on in the Salem witch trials where Chichaba, Sarah Good, Sarah Osborne,
05:10the first three accused of witchcraft, they are the typical outcasts or misfits or people who are
05:15different. But later as the trial goes on, you do really have some upstanding citizens who get named
05:21as witches. And that leads to a broader suspicion among some quarters of the Salem community about
05:27whether or not any of this is accurate at all. Okay, so this is the part that genuinely messes
05:32with my head a little. Like, look at this. It's just a normal market. People buying vegetables,
05:36kids running around, people huggling over carrots. If you look at this scene and you look at the fact
05:41that there are people going about their business, buying and selling wares and food, talking to one
05:46another, it's a good reminder that even though there were these moments of witch panics, even
05:51though there were periods where people were tremendously anxious about the harm that witches
05:56could cause to their lives, people also lived as normal. People weren't thinking about witches
06:0124-7. People sometimes lived for years without even seeing a witch trial or even hearing of one
06:08from a relative or a neighbor. Can I ask, what did they say you did? My neighbor's cow died the
06:15morning
06:15after we argued. That was enough. The thing about this, my neighbor's cow died the morning after we
06:20argued and that was enough. The problem with that is it suggests that all it took for someone to be
06:25accused of witchcraft was one act. And it's certainly true that in moments of witch panics where lots
06:31of people have been accused, people could be swept up quite easily for small means. But typically,
06:36a witchcraft allegation came after someone had built a reputation over the years or had gotten
06:41in lots of quarrels and fights with their neighbors. And I think to say a cow died and it's immediately
06:46a threat of witchcraft kind of undermines how seriously people in this period took it and really
06:51wanted to understand why bad things were befalling them. And did anyone speak up for you? Also, no one
06:57would have been in jail by themselves. Jails were crowded, jails were full of vermin, people were sleeping
07:03on straw that was often damp, crawling with mice and other things. And here, her having a bench
07:09and a jail cell to herself, even though it doesn't look very nice, would have been much better conditions
07:13than the average accused witch would have been subjected to. My husband has mouths to feed. He
07:17cannot afford to be associated with me now. She's been abandoned by everyone she knows. For a cow.
07:2319 people were executed here. 19. At least this video gets the hanging part right. I'll give it that.
07:30And not one of them was a witch. Like obviously they were just people accused by other people.
07:35It is true that witches were just people accused by other people. But I think we have to be careful
07:41in any sort of suggestion that people in the 16th, 17th century were more credulous than we are,
07:48just believed whatever. They were more gullible, more irrational. That's not true. In the context of
07:52their perceived reality, witchcraft was a serious threat. They were genuinely afraid about what might happen
07:58to their futures, to their families, to themselves. Witchcraft at its core was about fear. So without
08:05question, the people who died for this imagined crime of witchcraft were just ordinary people. But
08:11the accusations that brought them to the gallows, they were rooted in people being afraid. Fear is a
08:17really dangerous thing and we should be careful in not assuming that we as a society are any more insulated
08:22from the power of fear or not knowing or otherness, making us do really horrific things to our loved
08:29ones and to our neighbors. Enough of that.
08:35Eyes down. Don't look at her. Is she the woman from the woods?
08:37So one of the things that's really interesting to me about this video is the kid asked,
08:42is she the woman from the woods? But the thing about witches in the early modern period is they
08:47didn't live apart from the community. They were believed to be your neighbor, your friend and
08:51intimate and acquaintance. And that's what made them so terrifying. They could be the intimate enemy.
08:56So I think this idea of, is that the woman from the woods? Is that the witch from the woods?
09:00That is very much coming from fairy tales. That's coming from pop culture. Even though,
09:05of course, witches in this period were believed to congregate in the woods, they didn't live there.
09:09They lived among you. Witch. She cursed the miller boy. So when that guy crosses himself,
09:16when this supposed witch walks by, the Puritans, which I think this is depicting,
09:20would have found that appalling, right? The sign of the cross making it over your body was seen as a
09:25very Catholic, even Pope-ish symbol. And for the Puritans, that was a no-go.
09:29Oh no, stay away. Stay away from her.
09:41The clothing is all wrong here. Let's take a closer look.
09:46This little girl is wearing a very cute, but very inaccurate sweater. The pattern that she has on
09:53is sort of this fair isle print, the type that gets developed in Shetland, in Scotland,
09:58in the 18th century, primarily first for fishermen's hats. No one in the context of 17th century New
10:04England was wearing this pattern with this saturated of colors. The style is great. The history is bad.
10:11I feel your pain. Let me also say that if this woman was genuinely believed to be a witch, there
10:19is no
10:19way this mother would just stand there and let her child be touched by her. People were afraid of
10:25witches. They believed witches could do harm. And a lot of that fear was rooted in this idea that
10:31witches could harm children, could impede fertility, could cause babies to wither and die. So unless this
10:37is the world's worst 17th century mother, I highly doubt she would be putting her child before this purported witch.
10:47Mama, I can feel my legs again.
10:50And one of the things that is really important to know about the witch hunts is that even white
10:56magic, even good and healing magic was considered by authorities to be something that involved a deal
11:02with the devil. That's how people understood that ordinary Jack and Jill peasant would be able to
11:07perform magic at all. They thought they had made a pact with Satan. So therefore magic in all of its
11:12forms,
11:13according to most authorities during this time period, was in fact demonic. Let's move on to the next video.
11:23If you take this, you'll feel better. One of the things that this video is already insinuating
11:28is that the accused witch was actually a witch. The thing is, while there were of course some wise women
11:36and cunning folk who were accused of witchcraft during the 16th and 17th centuries, the vast majority of those
11:41accused were not. Most people were just ordinary men and women, mostly women, who got caught up in fear
11:48and reputation and in this sort of chain of events, this perfect storm that led to the deaths of so
11:55many. So I think it's really misleading to suggest that an accused witch is waking up, opening a book,
12:01doing a potion, doing spells. That takes away from the fact that these truly were innocent people who were
12:07believed to be engaged in a very deadly demonic conspiracy.
12:13No, there's no way this street would be so clean. It would be covered in horse and other animal
12:18shit, I would like to add. So this is, this is a very pristine, washed street that would not,
12:24you would not have found it anywhere in the 17th century, much less up until the 20th.
12:34I'm not a witch. She poisoned my daughter. Guilty. I will note that in that video,
12:40they have American accents as they're saying, she poisoned my daughter, she's guilty. That would not
12:45have been the case in the 17th century. The colonists of New England still very much held on to much
12:50of
12:50their English dialect. A lot of things going on here in this particular scene. The way that hangings
13:01worked in this period is that the accused climbed up a ladder and then was turned off the ladder.
13:07The hanging was slow. It was painful. It was in some ways sort of horrific to watch, but it wasn't
13:12a sort of lights out moment like you have as later scaffolds get developed and trap doors and other
13:18things are sort of built into these sort of structures of state-sanctioned murder.
13:23So this scaffold too is inaccurate for a range of reasons.
13:28You brought this on yourselves. And here again, this video is suggesting that this was a real witch
13:33and the subtext is that they were right to execute her. These were ordinary people. These were not witches.
13:45I don't know what the green gas is. I got questions about that. That again is clearly pulling from pop
13:51culture. And of course, this is how AI slop videos work, right? They scrape whatever is available in
13:56the public domain and sometimes things that are not available in the public domain, things that are
14:00stolen. And this is clearly sort of a Disneyfication of this particular video. And I hate it. All right, next.
14:11So this one already is fascinating because here we have kind of quintessential images of the
14:18Witch's Sabbath. These nocturnal gatherings, witches were believed to have under cover of darkness on a
14:24mountain in the woods away from human sight. And people believed at these Witch's Sabbaths that all
14:29sorts of dastardly deeds were being done. People were committing cannibalistic infanticide,
14:34having ritual orgies with Satan and other various and sundry acts. But here we have
14:39women sort of dancing happily without any sign of the demonic or of the things about witchcraft that
14:45people were really terrified of. So I think this is a really good example of people reclaiming today
14:51the idea of what witchcraft is, the idea that when women to gather together, it can be powerful and
14:56not necessarily frightening. One of the things that is the most sort of archetypal, the most stereotypical
15:05when we think of witches is, of course, the pointed hat. Some people think the pointed hat comes from
15:11anti-Semitic stereotypes about what Jews were purportedly meant to wear in the late medieval period.
15:17Other scholars say the pointy witch's hat is kind of a bastardization of typical headwear that sometimes
15:24Puritans and others wore that had that kind of triangular shape. But regardless, the pointed hat
15:30doesn't actually become a mainstay of the witchcraft stereotype until the 18th century, until after the
15:36witch trials have reached their heyday and have begun to end. When you see a pointed hat, know that it's
15:42a
15:42feature of popular culture that has maybe some roots in history, but is more the product of
15:47later depictions of the witch. Let's move on to the next video.
15:50Day three of not being a witch, but apparently my herbal tea cured a headache, so now I'm on trial.
15:55So this video suggests that this woman gives herbal tea to someone, it works, and then they are on trial.
16:02That is totally bogus. If you were an ordinary neighbor, if you gave a friend or a loved one a
16:09tea
16:09because their head hurt, that's normal herbal medicine. Most people practice that. Most witchcraft
16:14allegations start with a misfortune. Your baby dies of a mysterious illness in the course of two days
16:21and you don't know what happened to them. Your husband becomes impotent and you worry about the
16:26future of your line of your family. Your cow is unable to produce milk like normal. There's a freak
16:32frost that causes your crops to die much earlier in the season than they should have done. These are the
16:37sorts of things that made ordinary people think to themselves, what's the cause of this? And they
16:43didn't immediately go from zero to she's a witch, right? They wondered about natural causes. But in
16:49ruling them out and if there was someone in their lives who they didn't trust, who had a negative
16:53reputation, that could then spiral into accusing a neighbor, someone who's in the village, of causing
17:00that harm to themselves, families, livelihoods. All right, next. Come closer. Don't be afraid. I'll show
17:10you what real magic is. So this video has nothing to do with the actual history of the witch hunts
17:19or
17:19even historical ideas about witches so much as our modern pop culture idea of what a witch is. Everything
17:26here is stereotypical, right? The green potion, the scary face, the hat. You know, people did believe
17:32that some witches brewed potions and poisonous ointments and these sorts of things. But the way
17:38this video is presenting it is very much fantastical, very much Disney-fied, although a scary Disney.
17:43Disney married with the Brothers Grimm. It's not actually about the history. Let's move on.
17:49Mistress Hale, you are accused of covenanting with the devil. Right off the bat, there are a couple
17:54things wrong with this video. Number one, why are they holding a hearing outside? It's Puritan New
18:00England. It is cold AF half the time. They're not meeting outside. They're not meeting outside in the
18:06summer or the winter. Typically, the trials were held in the Salem townhouse, which was a municipal
18:11building that functioned as a courtroom. No one is standing barefoot out in the dirt because, of course,
18:17the judges themselves would not want to have conducted trials in the elements. So the location from the
18:23outset, wrong. What say you? I swear before God I have done no such thing. This part is accurate,
18:28right? A lot of the people who were accused of witchcraft in Salem and elsewhere really attested
18:34to their innocence. And they didn't want to confess to something that they hadn't done. These people
18:39were concerned about their salvation. They wanted to be right with God. So when asked, have you met the
18:44devil? Have you done his deeds in the woods? Have you harmed these children? They often said no. Until,
18:50of course, in certain times and places, other sorts of pressure was applied that led to some people
18:56confessing. So this video is set in Salem. And in Salem, something interesting happens. People who are
19:02accused of witchcraft and confess, they actually stay alive because they are used as witnesses for
19:08the prosecution. The first accused witch, Tituba, is really a prime example of this. She confesses,
19:15and then that's more fodder for those who want to go after the scourge of witchcraft in the community.
19:21That's unusual though. In other places in Europe, if you confess, it's the most important,
19:26most surefire evidence to send you to the gallows or to the fire.
19:30The testimonies claim otherwise. Will you confess and seek mercy?
19:33I am no witch.
19:33That line, I am no witch, we have records of people in Salem saying that very thing. I'm not a
19:39witch.
19:40I've never met the devil. I would never do this. I'm a godly woman. So many of these AI slop
19:45videos
19:45are purportedly set in Salem. Now, of course, no Salem that would have been recognizable to people
19:51in the 17th century, but regardless. And this should cause us to ask, why does Salem loom so large in
19:58the
19:58popular imagination and in all of the sort of material out there that AI is vacuuming up and
20:05slopping out into these truly questionable and terrible videos? And that's because of the
20:11prominence of America in the pop culture market. It's because of Arthur Miller's The Crucible
20:17and the film that got made. It's because of the popularity of the 2015 film The Witch. It's because
20:24when people think of a phenomena, America looms really large. But Salem is a drop in the bucket
20:31of the broader story of the early modern witch hunts. Salem, 20 people die. Now, any loss of
20:36life is tragic, right? 19 people are hanged. One is pressed to death. Lots of other people languish in
20:41jail. A lot of other people's lives damaged because of accusations. But that's a small number if you look
20:47at Europe as a whole and you realize that 100,000 people were accused in Europe between the late 15th
20:54and early 18th century. And of those, 50,000 people, mostly women, lost their lives. Enough of that.
21:09The first thing I'll say about this video is it suggests that there is a cohesive idea of a witch
21:14prior to the 14th or 15th century when the idea of the demonic witch really develops and solidifies.
21:20So you don't really have the idea of the witch prior to that in Europe, at least not in the
21:25way
21:25that leads to the witch hunts. So that alone is inaccurate here.
21:38So here we're in the heyday of the witch hunts, right? By the time we get to the second half
21:42of the
21:4316th century. And this video is depicting all of these witches purportedly over time as being
21:49young, as being beautiful at the height of their beauty, which I think is sort of the
21:55creator's way of, well, the AI's way of making this a tragic heroine figure. But in reality,
22:00most of those accused of witchcraft insofar as we know their ages, and I should say often we don't,
22:06but many of them were middle-aged, right? In their 40s, in their 50s. Now that's not true everywhere,
22:11but it is a pattern. And it's a pattern that matters because often someone was first suspected of
22:17witchcraft when they were young, the purported age of some of these AI figures. But they weren't
22:22actually accused until decades later, once that reputation, once that suspicion among their
22:28neighbors had built up and crystallized into something that could lead to a deadly allegation.
22:36Here, actually, you have an image of a supposed witch that's, I think, meant to be kind of a
22:42Puritan-esque witch in the black and white garb. But 1715, the witch trials had ended in Puritan New
22:49England. And ordinary people weren't typically wearing black garb. It was expensive. They might
22:54wear it when they went to church, but it wasn't the normal common dress.
23:02The only good thing about this video, and I mean the only, is the fact that we have very cute
23:07cats
23:07on display. And cats are associated with witchcraft for a couple of reasons. Cats were associated with
23:12heresy even before the witch trials began because cats are mysterious creatures, right? They're both
23:18domestic and wild. They behave in sort of unpredictable ways. If anybody has ever heard a
23:24cat get in a fight, that is an unholy sound. And actually, the 90s are representing this kind of
23:30goth phenomenon. You start actually to see in some of the later depictions in this video,
23:34a much more modern understanding of witchcraft as something potentially empowering, something that
23:40you opt into. That's enough AI slop for today and forever. I hope I cleared some things up.
23:49I'll see you in the next video.