A Jesus made of vegetables, bizarre log cabins, products that don't exist. AI-generated images are creating new forms of clickbait and causing some users to doubt what's real.The proliferation of AI-generated images"has made Facebook a very bizarre, very creepy place for me," said Casey Morris, an attorney in Northern Virginia.
They're not being posted by people she knows or follows. Instead, Facebook is suggesting she might be interested in them — and they seem to be really popular. "We saw AI-generated images of everything you can imagine, from log cabins to grandmas with birthday cakes to children with masterful paintings that just simply couldn't be real," said Josh Goldstein, a research fellow at Georgetown University and co-author of the preprint study, which hasn't yet undergone peer review.
Their analysis found that some of these pages are classic spam, posting links to websites where they can collect ad revenue. Others are scammers, advertising AI-generated products that don't appear to actually exist. "It's mimicking, like, all of the elements of what made something go viral. But they're putting in the most bizarre images I've ever seen," said Brian Penny, a freelance writer who has been tracking AI on Facebook for nearly two years. He's part of a group dedicated to sharing and debunking AI images.