Disclaimer

Verno mixes two things that normally stay apart: history as it is understood, and pictures that were made by a machine this morning. This page is about telling them apart.

The images are not records

Every image and every video on Verno is generated by an AI model, on someone's instruction. None of it was photographed, painted at the time, or witnessed. A convincing scene of a Roman street is a guess with good lighting.

That holds even when the details look right. The model has seen a great many images of Roman streets; it has not seen a Roman street.

Treat what you see here as illustration, in the way an artist's impression in a museum is illustration — helpful for imagining, useless as evidence.

The text can be suggested, too

Verno can propose the moments of a timeline, fill in a date, or write a description. Those suggestions are plausible, not verified. They come from a model that is right about well-documented history far more often than it is wrong, and that is not the same as being right.

What the maker of a timeline does with a suggestion is up to them: keep it, rewrite it, throw it out. So the quality of a timeline is the quality of the person who made it, not of the machine that helped.

What Verno marks

What kind it is, is marked. Every moment carries whether it is world history, a what-if, fiction or a prediction about the future, and that shows on the moment itself. Undermining that marking is against the code of conduct.

Sources are shown where they exist. A moment can carry sources, and where they have been checked you can see how well it is held up.

Images are marked as AI-generated. Every generated image carries the European Union's AI label in its lower corner: a small circle with the letters AI. Point at it or tap it and it tells you what it is, which model made it, and that a model can get details wrong. The same marking is written inside the file, so it travels with the image if you save it and put it somewhere else. An image here without that mark is a fault on our side, not an exception — tell us if you find one.

Dates are often approximate on purpose

A moment can say "around 1650" or "the 14th century" because that is what is known. Verno stores that as a range rather than pretending to a precision nobody has. A date that looks exact is exact; a date that looks vague is vague for a reason.

What not to use Verno for

Do not cite it. Not for schoolwork, not for journalism, not for anything legal, medical or financial. Where a timeline gives sources, follow those and cite them instead — that is what they are there for.

Something wrong?

Tell us at verno.foundation/report, or tell the person who made the timeline. Both work, and the second is usually faster.