Thread by @conspirator0

By reverse image searching a GAN-generated face pic (i.e. the "faces" produced by thispersondoesnotexist.com), one can often find Twitter accounts with GAN-generated profile pics. Today's search led to a massive botnet with a bit of everything. #ThursdayShenaniGANs

cc @ZellaQuixote

This botnet consists of 16512 accounts, created in batches between February 18th and March 21st, 2021. All either follow or are followed by dozens or hundreds of other members of the botnet (and by very few accounts that are not part of the botnet).

The bots in this network are grouped into clusters of a few hundred accounts each that follow or are followed by many other accounts within their cluster. The accounts mostly don't follow accounts in other clusters, but do reply to them.

The vast majority of this network's content is replies. Original tweets are mostly porn, and the accounts mostly retweet and reply to other members of the network. Replies appear to be nonsensical strings of letters and are repeated across accounts.

This network uses three different types of GAN-generated profile pics:

• human faces (mostly female) - 2092 accounts
• cats - 2037 accounts
• anime characters - 1944 accounts

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used to produce the images)

(the GAN-generated anime pics, since there wasn't room to include them with the previous tweet)

We recently posted about another botnet that used a mixture of GAN-generated human face, cat, and anime pics, btw. In what is no doubt a total coincidence, that botnet was suspended a couple of days before the creation of the oldest accounts in this botnet.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1360843602683973633

Here's an animated visualization of blending the GAN-generated "human" face pics, demonstrating that the major facial features (particularly the eyes) are in the same location on each image. (This isn't true of the GAN-generated cats and anime characters.)