As you’ve probably already read about or seen in the digital wild, Meta’s flagship platform and former namesake Facebook is drowning in a fast-rising tide of AI-generate garbage. Spammers, ever eager to churn and burn through content, have taken to generative AI as a means of creating cheap and easily automatable virality-seeking imagery. And because this is Facebook, these fake images tend to center on themes and motifs that do well with the Boomer crowd that populates the platform: babies and kids, dogs, Jesus, pretty much anything America-coded — flags, bald eagles, cops, and so on — and US soldiers and veterans. (View Highlight)
Just incredible stuff. And overall, the image feels like an acute exhibit of the ways AI spammers are transforming Facebook into a parody of itself. After all, it has all of the makings of a more conventional, AI-free viral Facebook post: military personnel, conspiracy-coded dose of Americana, and a beg for a like or a share. Lensed through AI, however, the resulting output is distorted and exaggerated — sort of like Facebook, in the age of AI, is now just wearing a Facebook costume, massive single boot and all. (View Highlight)
The account “Babies adorable” is loaded with AI spam ranging from a Ripped Bald Eagle with Arms to an “Innocent” Dad Making Wooden Roses to many, many more images of soldiers and veterans with prosthetics. And while a lot of these images are undeniably funny in their perverse, clownish glory, the comments sections rarely fail to offer a sobering glimpse into the reality that some Facebook scrollers aren’t quite getting the joke. (View Highlight)
