Social media has always been home to clickbait, fake photos, tall stories and gullible chumps. And now, thanks to generative AI, you can have all those joys without any of the tedious creativity.
Social media has always been home to clickbait, fake photos, tall stories and gullible chumps. And now, thanks to generative AI, you can have all those joys without any of the tedious creativity.
First up is a category I call "carve the other one, it's got bells on"
Above are three images from recent Facebook posts. Each depicts a supposed wooden sculpture along the proud person who created them. Of course, they are all AI generated. They're all captioned with some kind of engagement bait : "My grandfather made this, but unfortunately no one seems to like his work" or "I built a monument to my mother"
Next, we have the seminal type of this kind of AI spam : "Baking sadcore"
Two screenshots showing women posing behind colourful birthday cakes that they allegedly baked themselves. The first one is apparently a forty-two year old woman who is crying because she has no husband or children; the second is a woman clearly no older than eighty but whom the caption claims is 105.
And finally, the third category, the ever popular "implausibly cute and/or suffering animals"
Three more screenshots: the first has either an implausibly small baby or an unfeasibly large kitten snuggled up together in the middle of a country road, the second a mother cat and seven AI generated kittens and finally a laughably skinny polar bear with its entire rib cage pretty much on the outside of its body.
Now, to any person who has ever seen an AI image or indeed seen anything in the real world, you'd think it would be obvious that these are fake images. Nobody would seriously engage with this content. And yet, other each of this images there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of positive comments. Particularly with the sadcore ones, people are commenting words of praise and admiration to the non-existent subjects who are weeping over their creations.
So braindead and stereotypical are these comments that you might think they are themselves AI generated. But, picking a few at random, I checked out their profiles and they seem genuine. I didn't find any that showed up as duplicates of real people and they all had what seemed to be real people amongst their connections. They did also all seem to be active churchgoers but that must be some kind of coincidence...
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