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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jun 12, 2021 • 7 tweets • 5 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

It's Friday, and an armada of Instagram bots named Alex with GAN-generated face pics are promoting a follower sales site. #InstaGANs

(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com etc to generate fake face pics.)

cc: @ZellaQuixote

We found 1311 Instagram accounts with GAN-generated face pics, account names beginning with "alex-", and biographies containing "GET +10000 FOLLOWERS NOW" accompanied by random emoji. (Due to Instagram's lack of a public API, this was done via the website's search future.)

As is the case with unmodified GAN-generated face pics (so far), the major facial features (especially the eyes) are in the same position on each of the 1311 images. This anomaly becomes visually apparent when the images are blended.

GAN-generated face pics have a variety of another anomalies as well, ranging from nonsensical backgrounds, clothing, jewelry, and hats to vestigial heads and random colored blobs on faces. Here are some of the more ridiculous examples from the Instagram botnet.

The bots in the network don't link to the follower sales site directly. Instead, they link to other Instagram accounts (usually @/soc.secrets.promotion) that in turn link the sales site, socsecret(dot)com. (As always, be careful when visiting dodgy sites.)

This site sells followers/likes/views/etc on a variety of social media platforms: Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, Spotify, SoundCloud, and Pinterest. No free trial is presently offered, so we did not test it.

Interestingly, socsecret(dot)com shares an IP address with a whole bunch of other sites selling very similar illicit social media services. Several of them even offer APIs, allowing their customers to automate the purchasing of followers etc.

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Jun 6

Some thoughts on perennial pitfalls in news coverage of social media manipulation that frequently result in reporting on fake accounts/bots/etc being far less accurate and informative than it ought to be...

cc: @ZellaQuixote
conspirator0.com/p/journalism-i…

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Does thanking, praising, or insulting an LLM-based chatbot affect the speed or accuracy of its responses to questions involving basic arithmetic? Let's find out!

cc: @ZellaQuixote
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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.

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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.

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cc: @ZellaQuixote

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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.