I've seen a ton of pages in my feed with synthesized photos of things like log cabins, and unlike what the article mentions (comments "ranging from bot-like praise to snarky remarks aimed at users who seem to believe the images are real"), they are entirely met with praise, and never [as far as I can tell] called out by anyone as being AI generated. I assume the negative reactions are being hidden by the comment-ranking algorithm because of their sentiment. But I also wonder about the legitimacy of most of the accounts leaving comments. The whole thing seems like bots.
I have a good experience with Facebook because I've curated carefully. I hide or block stuff I don't like. I try to help the FB AI. I'm very happy with it. For example, my feed right now is (pages and groups latest to first):
AsAbove SoBelow
Lala Ladedalounge
Beat Poems On The Road
Follies Of God
LOST ANGELES
Buttermilk Junction
American Literature
AI Revolution - MidJourney AI, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion
RONGWRONG - The Marcel Duchamp Club
Self Inquiry and Direct Experience
Tall Ships
Neil deGrasse Tyson
No Ordinary Eyes
The Language Nerds
Robert Crumb Fans
Carl Jung Depth Psychology
AsAbove SoBelow
I try to do this on both Twitter and Facebook. It can be very difficult because even something like lingering too long looking at an image (or just stepping away from your computer while some AI crap is in view) can warp your algorithm immediately. Twitter is even worse, but at least it disincentivizes arguing, as engaging at all with people, including disagreement, will massively boost their content on your feed. I liked Dune Part 2, but reply tweeting about it once or twice shouldn't mean that 95% of my posts are (most engagement farming) Dune hot takes.
At least Youtube is fairly straightforward, you just groom your view history and you're good to go.
Besides hiding and blocking, liking posts/comments plus making comments helps a lot to train the FB algorithm I find. But the scourge of FB is the "suggested posts" because anyone can pay for those and then broadcast them. It seems some don't know how to target their paid posts.
I rarely look at FB but last time I logged in my entire feed was:
- Insanely weird seemingly pointless AI generated spam like this. I saw Jesus clouds, AI generated waifus, and mechanical diagrams that were obviously 100% fake and wrong. Weird pointless crap. I wonder what the monetization strategy is here?
- Ads for quack medical products, dropship scams, and other dodgy crap.
- Very weird quasi-ads for web sites and Facebook groups about "ancient aliens," crackpot archaeology, and conspiranoid type content. I'm tempted to click one to see where it goes but don't want that linked to me in any way. I suspect these are funnels for either cults, political propaganda, or sites that sell quack medical products of the sorts sold on the Alex Jones show.
I used to get obvious political ragebait, and then it was lots of photos of women whose nipples were obviously visible through their clothes which, while certainly an improvement, was not the reason I had signed into Facebook. I haven't logged in in ages now.
Also, Youtube shows me ads saying my penis is too small to please my partner, but they'll sell me something to make it bigger.
If FAANG is supposed to be the best and brightest, I'm not seeing it.
> “In fact, it was the original DCHS Band’s Facebook page, but was hijacked from our high school band, and has since become what you see today,” Jarvis wrote. “There have been countless attempts (from the band director, school officials, current band members, and alumni) to regain control, report the page/images, etc., but Facebook has been non-responsive.”
The article doesn't really touch on it until the very end, but the accounts doing the responding are probably just bots, too. Bots posting AI images, which earn "Amen"s from other bots.
I have friends and relatives on Facebook who repost not these Jesus things, but other categories of similar AI-generated garbage. The ones I've seen the most of are fake houses - elaborate log cabins in the woods with massive swimming pools that melt into the wall if you look too closely, and recently a lot of fake eclipse photos from my more scientifically-minded but not-too-critical-thinking friends.
Like the ones described in this article, they come from pages that churn them out, and they get tens or hundreds of thousands of comments, likes, and reposts. For a while I'd scroll through them looking to see if anybody was saying anything other than "WOW!!", and you'd get the occasional "ur so stupd, this is AI" followed by a bunch of people saying "who cares if it's real or not", etc. I guess there's money somewhere in engagement hacking? I followed one to a web site that claimed to be a design company, but it was just post after post of machine-generated impossible objects, so I don't quite see where any of this is meant to go. (google "volkswagen bus hot tub" to find easy examples)
I wonder if this is an exercise to quickly identify certain polarized and vulnerable groups, for targeting in disinfo/misinfo campaigns etc.
The "opt-out" Meta AI intrusion where the chatbot auto-replies after 1 hr is quite concerning. I guess it's one way of generating training data, but jeez.
This is like 50% of my fb content right now. Facebook is not doing well.
Have been trying to block a bunch of these accounts, but new similar ones just pop up all the time.
What a wasteland.