Elon Musk-Themed A.I. Slop ⇥ 404media.co

Jason Koebler, 404 Media:

I have reported on AI-generated spam for a year now, and have watched as different trends come and go. In August, when I wrote about this community of people, bizarre Jesus content, surreal landscapes and dream homes, and birthday celebration posts were performing very well on Facebook. At the time, one Facebook AI spammer told me that they intended to begin spamming Facebook with “American news.” It is clear that pro-Elon Musk inspiration porn is the new strategy, or “meta” for these spammers, and creating AI spam that specifically targets people in the United States is part of the new strategy. The YouTube page for one of the Indian influencers who teaches people how to do this is full of videos for “USA CHANNELS” and US-focused spam. This strategy is clearly trickling down to Facebook at a large scale that is impossible to quantify or systematically study because Meta has killed CrowdTangle, a research tool that showed how content spread on the platform.

It seems to me this would not be nearly so popular if not for two phenomena: the transition of Facebook into a recommendations-focused product, and the idolization of tycoons. Yes, the invention of semi-realistic image generators is a necessary component, but the slop would not be nearly as successful if it did not have those two factors. Facebook is now a mix of the stuff people signed up for — like pictures from their friends, and group discussions with people in their neighbourhood — and suggestions of all kinds of crap Facebook thinks they might want to see. Also, ads, which are functionally similar in that they are things people did not ask for and must endure in order to see the things they care about.

Facebook promotes posts based in part on the activity they generate — comments, likes, and views — which is unsurprising. These things can be indicators of a noteworthy post. But Goodhart’s law suggests signals like these can become targets, therefore making them useless as metrics. Even so, they are used by Facebook to pollute users’ feeds with unrelated posts and juke engagement statistics. I do not think these posts would be nearly as widespread if they were not recommended to users. If people had to seek them out, the odd one would be shared by one of your more gullible friends.

Koebler says these posts are likely being propelled into users’ feeds by other real people, not automated traffic. That also suggests to me some level of CEO-as-celebrity idolization. This does not work for every business magnate — how many viral posts have you seen invoking Thomas Peterffy, or Gina Rinehart, or even Phil Knight? These are all billionaires, but none has a public cult of personality in the same way as does Musk, or Bill Gates, or Jeff Bezos, or even, to some extent, Warren Buffett. If we correctly recognized the adversarial relationship these tycoons have with the rest of the world, I also think this slop would struggle to gain traction.