Thread by @conspirator0

It's February, and a group of accounts with GAN-generated profile pics are tweeting identical "Merry Christmas" tweets promoting some kind of NFT giveaway.

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to produce fake faces)

These accounts are part of a spam network consisting of (at least) 6105 accounts created in February 2022, mostly in large batches. All have GAN-generated profile pics. The same names are reused across accounts - the 6105 accounts only have 25 unique first names between them.

The GAN-generated face pics produced by tools like thispersondoesnotexist.com have the telltale trait that the major facial features (particularly the eyes) are in the same position on every image. This becomes obvious when the images are blended together.

Despite the fact that one can generate as many unique GAN faces as one desired, this spam network frequently uses the same fake face on multiple accounts.

The accounts in this network have followed several accounts en masse, mostly metaverse and/or NFT-themed. Former Ukraine President Petro @Poroshenko, current US President Joe Biden (@POTUS), and Tesla founder @elonmusk also turn up.

The accounts in this network (allegedly) tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web App. Their tweet content is a mix of original tweets, retweets, and replies.

The "original" content tweeted by this network consists of two tweets that have been repeated verbatim by hundreds of the accounts. (One of these tweets is the February "Merry Christmas" NFT giveaway tweet mentioned earlier.)

The network's retweets are also repetitive - almost all retweets are of the same four NFT/crypto tweets. The network's replies are all brief threads containing the phrase "Fishing Free NFTs" and tagging @Fishing_Crypto and large numbers of seemingly random accounts.

More information on GAN-generated profile pics in this compliation of threads:

Some additional info on signs that a face pic may be GAN-generated here: