Facebook AI Posts Epidemic

Overview

The Facebook AI Posts Epidemic, also known as AI-Generated Facebook Posts or Seniors Falling For AI-Generated Pics on Facebook, refers to discussions and press coverage about a group of spam accounts on Facebook that post strange artificial intelligence art and other AI-generated images, which flooded the platform in late 2023 and early 2024. Researchers and journalists identified hundreds of such accounts with posts that often garnered high engagement numbers on the platform. The accounts, which gained increasing prominence in 2023 going into 2024, tended to be linked to spam or scam websites, posted dozens of times a day and produced surreal imagery that often involved Jesus Christ, children, sea creatures and other subjects. The "My Son Made This With His Own Hand" images were a notable part of this event.

Background

AI-generated content has been posted on Facebook for years, but the proportion of AI-created posts present on the platform rose after the release and popularization of text-to-image generators like Midjourney and DALL-E in 2022 and 2023. The AI-generated images dominating Facebook increasingly appeared to feature subjects like Jesus Christ, shrimp and flight attendants, as well as the series of viral My Son Made This With His Own Hand content claiming to picture people and craft projects they had created (example seen below).^[5]

By late 2023, the prevalence of accounts spamming AI-generated images was large enough to generate conversations and an investigative piece in the tech journalism outlet 404 Media^[1] on December 18th, 2023, cataloging a number of the accounts posting the content (example post shown below).

A Stanford Internet Observatory Study about these spam accounts, in preprint draft form as of March 2024, tracked their rapid rise and argued that the accounts use techniques like buying bot followers and directing users to content farms and low-quality sites. The researchers proposed that changes made to Facebook's algorithm over the last three years to prioritize the discovery of "unconnected content" from pages that users did not already follow had helped enable the rise of AI-generated content.^[2]

Developments

As of late March 2024, Meta has not issued any response to reports of an AI-generated epidemic of content on Facebook. In February 2024, Meta announced that it would begin labeling AI-made content across all of its platforms, but a month later, nearly none of the posts relating to the trend were flagged with any kind of warning or tag according to reports.^[7]

Online Reactions

Various posts discussing or bringing awareness to the invasion of AI content on Facebook notably rose in early 2024 as social media users posted about it across numerous platforms.

For example, on TikTok, user @sidemoneytom created a series of videos documenting what he called the "Facebook AI epidemic," including the one (seen below, left) posted on January 12th, 2024, which received over 2.8 million views and 344,000 likes in two months.^[3] After the first video in the series, @sidemoneytom posted several more, including three in the week of March 18th that all earned over a million views in roughly a week. The video (seen below, right) that he posted on March 23rd connected the "epidemic" to the Dead Internet Theory and received over 1.8 million views and 200,000 likes in two days.^[4]

Posts discussing AI-generated content appearing at increasing rates on Facebook were also made to Reddit around this timeframe. For example, on January 30th, Redditor youneedtocalmdown20 made a post to the /r/midjourney^[9] subreddit including an example post, receiving over 1,600 upvotes and nearly 200 comments in two months (seen below, left). On February 19th, a similar post was made by Redditor Maxie445 on the /r/singularity^[10] sub, receiving over 3,000 upvotes and 500 comments in one month (seen below, right).

On X / Twitter, many reposted AI-generated Facebook content in early 2024, including X user @edmord17, who expressed alarm about the "Shrimp Jesus" images on March 13th, earning over 57,000 likes over the course of two weeks (shown below). On March 19th, X user @AlsikkanTV^[8] made a post claiming that they looked at their mother's Facebook and saw the AI content, earning over 3.9 million views and 27,000 likes in a week.

On March 23rd, 2024, the Daily Beast^[11] notably published an article titled "Facebook Is Filled With AI-Generated Garbage--and Older Adults Are Being Tricked" in which the publication discussed the rise of AI posts flooding the platform and how many older users were unable to tell the content was fake.

Search Interest

External References