The picture, posted July 4 on the Facebook page “Love Shares 3.0” for 71,000 followers, appears to be an aerial view of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican, with people gathered in the square. Overhead, dangling from a gigantic black helicopter, is what can only be a massive Bible, but the lettering on the book is garbled, and the cross on the cover has an extra arm. It looks as if the aircraft is about to drop this tome on the crowd below, flattening them. The caption is pure gibberish: “Close your eyes 70% and see magic / Today's my graduation / May 2024 is Your Best Year.” Additional hashtags identify the image as “art” and “painting.”
It is, quite clearly, AI-generated — though nobody in the comments mentions this. “Praise the lord,” writes one user. Many others reply with a simple “amen.” The image has close to 6,000 likes and “heart” engagements.
In the early 2010s, Facebook reshaped digital life as we know it. But in the past few years, a confluence of trends has left it uniquely vulnerable to click-farming pages that churn out AI-created junk. At a critical moment when online creators are weighing the benefits of integrating controversial AI tech into their personal brands, a shadow army of spam “creators” have already leveraged it to invade a platform mostly abandoned by such internet celebrities, eating away at whatever social value it has left. Worst of all, the very structure of Facebook appears to have encouraged this rot.
One factor, of course, is the rise of text-prompt image generators like Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, and DALL-E, which make it profoundly easy to create “original” works at a terrific rate. Facebook, meanwhile, was investing billions in CEO Mark Zuckerberg's “metaverse” boondoggle, and still has no real user base to show for it: Gen Z famously disdains the social network as uncool, preferring TikTok and the also Meta-owned Instagram, leaving Facebook with an aging demographic.
If the AI-reliant spam pages are any indication, many of those still scrolling Facebook can't tell or don't care when an image is fake, and have a particular fondness for certain comforting signifiers: Bibles, babies, American flags, soldiers , animals, luxurious homes, landscapes, and Jesus Christ. Then there are the images meant to evoke pity: patients in hospital beds, crying or endangered children, amputees, the homeless, the starving. Sometimes the imagined figure is shown holding a sign asking for birthday wishes, or explaining that they're a veteran. And in certain cases, there's no earthly explanation for what you're looking at — like this military truck that seems to be transporting giant carrots, but is also made out of them: