Someone has started a campaign for us to not trust

[WhiskeyGrinder]

12. Facebook's AI Spam Isn't the 'Dead Internet': It's the Zombie Internet

https://www.404media.co/facebooks-ai-spam-isnt-the-dead-internet-its-the-zombie-internet/

https://archive.ph/2JNKK

Over the last few months, many have proposed that the AI spam taking over Facebook is a great example of the “Dead Internet Theory,” which posits that large portions of the internet are made up of bots talking to bots, filtered through the lens of recommendation and engagement algorithms. Facebook is undeniably cooked, a decaying, depressing hall of horrors full of viral AI-generated content that seemingly gets worse every day.

But I do not think Facebook is the dead internet. Instead, I think it is something worse. Facebook is the zombie internet, where a mix of bots, humans, and accounts that were once humans but aren’t anymore mix together to form a disastrous website where there is little social connection at all.

I have spent more time than anyone I know endlessly scrolling through AI spam on Facebook. I have watched the evolution of Facebook’s AI spam go from slightly uncanny modifications of real images to the completely bizarre and obviously fake. I have done this from my own Facebook account, which I have had since 2005, as well as from two burner accounts I created specifically to track how AI-generated content is recommended on the platform and to see whether Facebook would put AI-generated images into my feed organically. I now use Facebook exclusively to see what kinds of bizarre AI content is going viral, and to attempt to figure out who is making it, why they are making it, and who is interacting with it.

Over the last few months, I have messaged roughly 300 people who have commented on AI-generated posts to try to ascertain if they are real, which has been an arduous task because Facebook keeps rate-limiting me. I have studied the profiles and activity of hundreds of Facebook users who are commenting on these images. I have also asked my friends and family, as well as 404 Media readers, to send me examples of AI-generated images they’ve seen on Facebook. I have spoken to Stanford University researchers who attempted to systematically study this phenomenon, talked to Facebook users who have been closely tracking the spread of AI since last year, and I have scanned through tens of thousands of viral AI-generated images on the platform. Definitively saying what’s happening across the entire platform is impossible, because Facebook remains a gigantic social network with billions of active users. But I have now seen enough to make some educated guesses about what is happening.