404media have by far the best coverage of the epidemic of AI generated spam images on Facebook:
https://www.404media.co/where-facebooks-ai-slop-comes-from/
It is mainly driven by get rich quick YouTube influencers, many from India and the Philippines.
Unsurprisingly it is not a great way to actually make money.
A form that is particularly annoying to me is where official-sounding accounts are posting about plausible scientific advances or discoveries. Just yesterday, I saw some "James Webb Space Telescope" account gushing about new photos that dropped. They were beautiful, though obviously a little too nice, and of course NASA/JPL had released no such photos.
I can't put my finger on why this bugs me--and my wife thinks I'm being a pedantic when I comment that they're fake ("it's a nice picture, they like it, let them be")--but I think it has to do with the targeting of folks that absolutely would like that photo to be real.
In recent India's general election. A deepfake video of a leading politician costed a massive vote shift and they almost lost an election. The damage was done by the time they have clarified it is fake.
In Romania it's full of these pages that I never understood, but apparently they are used for 2 things:
- filter people that can be scammed, you can see that people commenting on these posts and congratulating whatever AI slop you have in the picture are targeted by bots that try to tell them they won something or getting them to buy various useless stuff online
- gather real likes and people in groups and for pages that later turn up to promote certain political candidates (see the recent annulled Romanian elections) or just change their names from "Beautiful Romania" to "Calin Georgescu for president"
> They did also all seem to be active churchgoers but that must be some kind of coincidence...
Oh i love this one !
He forgot to mention the reverse bait effect where loads of people engage due to their need to let us know that this is obviously ai. But in reallity these comments play a role in boosting the content
> The article you've just read is one such example.
There is no way to verify that. Until a method exists to discern real from AI-generated content, we should probably assume it's generated (for our safety).
Sadly, that's the world we live in now. It was kind of like that before, but it's even more so now.
Those worthless posts on Facebook are all bot engagement farms. You can recognize them for having nothing to do with anything, and the commenters are all bots as well. You can click on their profile because it has to be public. If you look at their friends, they won't be mostly from someplace like real friends would, they'll be from all over. Each one of them will have a cover photo that is a low quality picture of...some people, doing nothing. Their posts will all be bot engagement, with a few nothing pictures (such as a sunset with the caption "Nice sunset.")
It's all, 100%, crap.
Damn two of those would have fooled me too if I wasn't looking too carefully.. the one like the one with the old lady and her cake and the kittens one.
Better this AI generated crap than the cute animal stories and videos where the animals are abused and hurt and then the abused pretends to heal them to gain sympathy views and money.
What’s the end game here for Facebook? Surely people will just stop going to these platforms or is the thinking Ai + the algorithm will be even more effective… shutter at the thought
I saw this kind of posts since months ago and I wondered what is the point of "sadcore".
At first I thought they want to raise the engagement of some accounts and gather a following. But looking at the accounts, they doesn't seem to sell or promote anything.
Are they just sad trolls with a mission to amplify the amount of sadness in the world?
What social media has microtransaction stars?
Even before AI images became viable, you had folks in low cost countries doing the same thing with local talent. AI might make it easier but humans in those countries can give you art for a small enough amount that scale makes up the expense enough to profit.
This is even present in fandom communities where young artists from low cost countries charge a lot less than their high cost country counterparts, leading to popularity and exposure on top of just revenue.
The arts have so few barriers to competition that it's quite hard to compete unless your art is just that novel. Most artists that make a living do it by outputting boring things like commercial voiceovers, corporate illustrations, or headshot photography.
Maybe this an effect from ai, but this article reads like straight up ai
I was sent a YouTube video that was blatantly fake. Five seconds in I closed it and moved on. But I got curious.
I went back to the video and checked the channel. It has 7.4 million subscribers. It uploads 4 or 5 times a day. At least two 3 hours videos, and a couple short ones. All videos are generated with a voice over. All those that I have checked have comments with real people in them. This battle is already lost.
Critical thinking needs to be taught in schools. Either that or the society of the future is going to be hugely screwed.
If we teach kids critical thinking, they will not only be able to recognise scam, they will also stop being religious, which is another good thing.
I wonder why we still don't have critical thinking in schools.
It's kind of stupidity farming isn't it. Is there anything wrong with that? The stupid people get to do some engaging, which is after all what their brain evolved to enjoy, everyone's a winner? Maybe?
Easy to hate on this, but the existence of these kinds of things is so fascinating. Hundreds (maybe thousands) of people are out there generating AI click bait because people or system somewhere allows / encourages / pays for this market to exist
The villagers had a point about the scythe. Using it led to his house burning down.
To enrage or endear at all costs, the engagement justifies the means.
It is ironic that an article railing against people doing all they can for engagement ends with... a call to engage. Sign up for my newsletter.
Letting algorithms bring you slop of any kind is your own fault. wontfix.
Still waiting for the top notch open source video AI. Want to see those kittens squeezed in the hydraulic press. Let’s just hope it doesn’t take as long as the 4K to 8k transition.
Could this be some sort of meta training activity? Meta allows this kind of content and uses engagement as a measure of value for future training material.
I adopted this panda. Could really use some help but he brings me joy
You don't need AI to attach bullshit titles to photos. The problem is with Facebook algorithm that recommends content based on"engagement" - nothing good can come out of this by design. AI just makes bullshit makers more productive like the rest of us.
>Bizarre as it may seem, some people actually send real money to these "creators"
It's also just plain ol' ad revenue as well. Not such thing as bad engagement.
>And then there are opportunities to sell "guest posts" to other spam merchants who want to get their content in front of gullible eyeballs.
Yeah, that too. get ad revenue, then become the ad yourself.
and... the article ends. Well that was a lot more fluff than I anticipated. Yes, not much will change until the people themsevles start rejecting this content en masse. But there will be people falling for it. There are still people falling for old school email spam, so it's sadly not shocking AI works for the non-discerning viewer.
hard to put a finger on it, but i do think you should give humanity a little credit... it's actually somewhat easy to spot the "AI" when it does appear in these situations? or maybe i'm just deluded.
When it comes to images like those in the article, “Is this real?” is not really part of my reaction. Neither is “poor thing” or “wow that’s impressive” or whatever else.
My reaction is “why is this useless shit being shoved in my face?”.
I don’t care if it’s real, the only reason I visited the website is to check if the local market’s on this week, and maybe see if anyone I know has posted anything (increasingly unlikely). I think in the modern age it's healthy to have a much wider cynicism - what is this crap, I didn't ask for it, f### off.
I don’t really get why Facebook tries so hard to get me to look at this rubbish. The more of this shit-shovelling there is, the less often I go and the fewer friend posts there are. It’s becoming a dead platform.
Wow amazing article
The technology of mind-control is advancing at a furious pace. These AI generated images and videos are just the latest evolution.
Who is vulnerable? Who is immune? What will its final form look like?
What do the scifi prophets say?
(This vast irresistible mind-control machinery serves the billionaires of course)
Poverty is probably your best shield. Because then you can't afford a phone. Someday the universal suicide order will drop and the only people left will be monks and beggars.
There's a saddening effect that this kind of garbage foists onto society, and onto individual humans, that costs drastically more than the money the content itself scrapes up. On a societal level, you have the net effect of millions of individuals being duped into throwing their empathy at something absurdly false. That is a recipe for wild and random backlashes as people become convinced that the world is something it isn't. On an individual level, liking some fake bullshit, then realizing it's fake, causes people to feel humiliated. Ultimately, being humiliated by giving away your empathy to the wrong subject causes people to become angry and reject their natural empathy towards legitimate other people, having been fooled so many times already.
Maybe a better way of saying this is: Bad currency drives out good. And if the currency is empathy and sympathy itself, then we are racing toward a society that will no longer be able to cast itself into anyone else's shoes.