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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Apr 29, 2021 • 10 tweets • 7 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

Are these spammy replies from accounts with cat avatars some mysterious form of feline communication? Nope, it's another botnet, and the cats are fake (GAN-generated, similar to those produced by thiscatdoesnotexist.com).

cc: @ZellaQuixote

The reply spammers with the GAN-generated cat pics follow a bunch of other accounts with GAN-generated cat avatars, as well as GAN-generated human face pics and anime pics (and some other things), all with similar follow stats and all created in April 2021.

By recursively exploring the follow relationships of the initial group of accounts, we found 5007 accounts that we believe to be part of the botnet, created in batches between April 2nd and April 27th, 2021.

To date, only 1226 of the 5007 accounts in this network have tweeted. Almost all tweets are repetitive replies consisting of nonsensical strings of letters. They mostly reply to porn accounts (porn is also what they retweet on the rare occasions that they retweet something).

This network uses 3 different types of GAN-generated profile pic (GAN = "generative adversarial network, the AI technology used to produce the images):

• 681 human faces (thispersondoesnotexist.com)
• 660 cats (thiscatdoesnotexist.com)
• 656 anime pics (thiswaifudoesnotexist.com)

543 of the accounts in the network use the default profile pic. The remaining 2467 of the accounts use a variety of images, most of which are repeated across multiple accounts (the collage shows some examples).

The GAN-generated human face pics have the telltale trait that the major facial feature (particularly the eyes) are in the same pixel position on each image. This becomes apparent when one blends all the images together, as in this video:

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1265499678713536516

For more information on detecting the various types of GAN-generated pics, here is a trio of threads:

• faces

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1265499678713536516

• cats

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1381006494901096449

• anime

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1320226536566542338

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

Finally, we suspect that this is at least the third incarnation we've seen of this particular botnet. Analyses of the previous two:

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

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1375313401208045572

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1387607130719588356

Typo in one o the tweets in this thread (missing quote mark) - first sentence should read:

This network uses 3 different types of GAN-generated profile pic (GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technology used to produce the images):

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1387607130719588356

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Mar 8

Just for fun, I decided to search Amazon for books about cryptocurrency a couple days ago. The first result that popped up was a sponsored listing for a book series by an "author" with a GAN-generated face, "Scott Jenkins".

cc: @ZellaQuixote

Alleged author "Scott Jenkins" is allegedly published by publishing company Tigress Publishing, which also publishes two other authors with GAN-generated faces, "Morgan Reid" and "Susan Jeffries". (A fourth author uses a photo of unknown origin.)

As is the case with all unmodified StyleGAN-generated faces, the facial feature positioning is extremely consistent between the three alleged author images. This becomes obvious when the images are blended together.

Read 5 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Feb 8

The people in these Facebook posts have been carving intricate wooden sculptures and baking massive loaves of bread shaped like bunnies, but nobody appreciates their work. That's not surprising, since both the "people" and their "work" are AI-generated images.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

In the last several days, Facebook's algorithm has served me posts of this sort from 18 different accounts that recycle many of the same AI-generated images. Six of these accounts have been renamed at least once.

The AI-generated images posted by these accounts include the aforementioned sculptures, sad birthdays, soldiers holding up cardboard signs with spelling errors, and farm scenes.

The common element: some sort of emotional appeal to real humans viewing the content.

Read 7 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jan 24

As Bluesky approaches 30 million users, people who run spam-for-hire operations are taking note. Here's a look at a network of fake Bluesky accounts associated with a spam operation that provides fake followers for multiple platforms.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This fake follower network consists of 8070 Bluesky accounts created between Nov 30 and Dec 30, 2024. None has posted, although some have reposted here and there. Almost all of their biographies are in Portuguese, with the exception of a few whose biographies only contain emoji.

The accounts in this fake follower network use a variety of repeated or otherwise formulaic biographies, some of which are repeated dozens or hundred of times. Some of the biographies begin with unnecessary leading commas, and a few consist entirely of punctuation.

Read 8 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jan 10

It's presently unclear why, but over the past year someone has created a network of fake Facebook accounts pretending to be employees of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Many of the accounts in this network have GAN-generated faces.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This network consists of (at least) 80 Facebook accounts, 48 of which use StyleGAN-generated faces as profile images. The remaining 32 all use the same image, a real photograph of a random person sitting in an office.

As is the case with all unmodified StyleGAN-generated faces, the main facial features (especially the eyes) are in the same position on all 48 AI-generated faces used by the network. This anomaly becomes obvious when the faces are blended together.

Read 6 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Oct 18, 2024

None of these chefs exist, as they're all AI-generated images. This hasn't stopped them from racking up lots of engagement on Facebook by posting AI-generated images of food (and occasional thoughts and prayers), however.

cc: @ZellaQuixote

These "chefs" are part of a network of 18 Facebook pages with names like "Cook Fastly" and "Emily Recipes" that continually post AI-generated images of food. While many of these pages claim to be US-based, they are have admins in Morocco per Facebook's Page Transparency feature.

Between them, these 18 Facebook "chef" pages have posted AI-generated images of food at least 36,000 times in the last five months. Not all of the images are unique; many have been posted repeatedly, sometimes by more than one of the alleged chefs.

Read 7 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Sep 8, 2024

Can simple text generation bots keep sophisticated LLM chatbots like ChatGPT engaged indefinitely? The answer is yes, which has some potentially interesting implications for distinguishing between conversational chatbots and humans.

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.substack.com/p/baiting-the-…

For this experiment, four simple chatbots were created:

• a bot that asks the same question over and over
• a bot that replies with random fragments of a work of fiction
• a bot that asks randomly generated questions
• a bot that repeatedly asks "what do you mean by <X>?"

The output of these chatbots was used as input to an LLM chatbot based on the 8B version of the Llama 3.1 model. Three of the four bots were successful at engaging the LLM chatbot in a 1000-message exchange; the only one that failed was the repetitive question bot.