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Facebook’s Algorithm Is Boosting AI Spam That Links to AI-Generated, Ad-Laden Click Farms


Viral 'Shrimp Jesus' and AI-generated pages like it are part of spam and scam campaigns that are taking over Facebook.

Facebook’s recommendation algorithms are promoting bizarre, AI-generated images being posted by spammers and scammers to an audience of people who mindlessly interact with them and perhaps don’t understand that they are not real, a new analysis by Stanford and Georgetown University researchers has found. Some of the pages which originally seemed to have no purpose other than to amass a large number of followers have since pivoted to driving traffic to webpages that are uniformly littered with ads and themselves are sometimes AI-generated, or to sites that are selling cheap products or outright scams. "While Shrimp Jesus is (perhaps) obviously an artistic fantasy—created by a page that previously shared clickbait links to a content farm—comments on many of the AI-generated images of more mundane things, like housewares, homes, or artwork purportedly created by children, suggest many users are unaware of the synthetic origin."

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