The proliferation of AI-generated images “has made Facebook a very weird and very scary place for me,” said Casey Morris, a lawyer in Northern Virginia.
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The proliferation of AI-generated images “has made Facebook a very weird and very scary place for me,” said Casey Morris, a lawyer in Northern Virginia.
Casey Morris, a lawyer from Northern Virginia, recently started checking Facebook again after a long hiatus. Among the posts from her friends and family, she noticed a strange trend.
“The caption will say: ‘Close your eyes 70% and see the magic.’ And without squinting, it’s very obviously some sort of image of Jesus, but it will be made up of, say, vegetables and a tractor and a little girl that are sort of distorted.” she declared.
That wasn’t the only oddity in Morris’ thread. Similar images with identical captions recur. The same was true for various, more emotional articles, depicting disabled mothers and children in the mud or smiling amputees, with captions asking for a birthday wish.
“It made Facebook a very weird and very scary place for me,” Morris said.
Between their subject matter, stylistic cues, and strange errors, it quickly became apparent to Morris that these images were fake—the product of artificial intelligence.
They are not posted by people she knows or follows. Instead, Facebook suggests she might be interested in them – and they appear to be very popular.
“They get thousands of reactions and thousands of comments (from) people who seem to think they’re real, so they wish them happy birthday or say something religious in the comments,” she said.
“These weren’t sporadic images here or there that only a few people were interacting with. They were really getting a lot of interest,” said Josh Goldstein, a researcher at Georgetown University.
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Morris isn’t the only Facebook user whose feed has started filling up with AI-generated spam. Journalists at technology website 404 Media have observed an increase in apparently AI-generated posts on Meta-owned Facebook in recent months. AI-generated images like these are also starting to appear on other social media sites, including Threads, which is also owned by Meta, and LinkedIn.
Spam and scams
On Facebook, in many cases, it appears that the platform’s algorithm is boosting AI-driven posts.
When researchers from Georgetown and Stanford universities investigated more than 100 Facebook pages that regularly post AI content – sometimes dozens of times a day – they found that many of them engaged in scams and fraud. spam.
“We’ve seen AI-generated images of everything you can imagine, from log cabins to grandmothers with birthday cakes to kids with masterful paintings that just couldn’t be real ” said Josh Goldstein, a researcher at Georgetown University and co-author. from the pre-print study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed.
Goldstein and his co-author also found that Facebook actively recommends some of this AI content in users’ feeds, potentially creating a cycle in which posts get more engagement, so they are recommended again more users. Some individual posts on the pages analyzed have accumulated hundreds of thousands or even millions of interactions.
“These weren’t sporadic images here or there that only a few people were interacting with. They were really getting a lot of interest,” Goldstein said.
Their analysis revealed that some of these pages are classic spam, posting links to websites where they can collect advertising revenue. Others are scammers who advertise AI-generated products that don’t appear to actually exist.
But many pages don’t have a clear financial motivation, Goldstein said. They seem to simply be accumulating an audience for unknown purposes.
“It could be that these were nefarious pages that were trying to build an audience and would later pivot to selling products or linking to ad-laden websites or perhaps even change their topics in some way. completely political thing,” Goldstein said. “But I suspect, more likely, many of these pages were simply creators who realized it was a useful tactic for getting audience engagement.”
Clickbait has always been on social media. But in recent years, Facebook has doubled the number of posts it recommends to users, in an effort to keep up with the social media evolution started by TikTok. During a recent earnings conference call, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg told analysts that recommended posts now account for about 30% of user feeds.
A shift from reality-based images to strangeness
At the same time, AI-generated content is now easier than ever for anyone to create. Together, these dynamics create a recipe for bizarre depictions of Jesus, disturbing birthday messages, and impossible-to-go-viral architecture and craftsmanship.
“It mimics, like, all the elements that made something go viral. But they put the most bizarre images I’ve ever seen,” said Brian Penny, a freelance writer who has been following Facebook AI for nearly 20 years old. two years. He is part of a group dedicated to sharing and demystifying images of AI.
Penny has seen a shift from images that have some basis in reality — like the AI-generated depiction of Pope Francis in a puffy coat that went viral last year — to something much stranger.
“We work to reduce the spread of spammy or sensational content because we want users to have a good experience, which is why we offer them control over what they see in their feed,” said a spokesperson for Meta to NPR in a statement.
Facebook says it will soon start labeling certain content created by AI tools.
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The company plans to soon begin tagging AI-generated content created with some industry-leading tools. Last week, TikTok began applying similar labels to some AI-generated posts on its platform.
Meanwhile, the increase in AI spam is turning many people off.
Katrina McVay, who lives in Grand Rapids, Michigan, says she has had to discourage her mother from buying woodwork and other decorative items she sees on Facebook — which are clearly fake.
“She was like, ‘Wouldn’t that be so cool for your daughter?'” McVay said. “And I’m like, ‘But that’s not real.'”
Some Facebook users are considering leaving the platform altogether due to their frustration with being recommended spammy AI images.
“Am I supposed to sift through all this to see that my cousin just went to the Sahara Desert?” asked Borys Rzonca, a Los Angeles furniture designer. “It’s not worth it to me anymore.”
Besides finding AI spam on Facebook annoying, many people NPR spoke with say they’re concerned about the larger issues surrounding artificial images appearing everywhere.
“It just reinforces people’s disbelief and … makes it harder to see what’s real,” said Hobey Ford, a North Carolina puppeteer who has seen AI images pop up in Facebook groups dedicated to science, claiming to represent new discoveries. .
“And I think that’s dangerous in our world today,” he said.
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