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Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Jun 14, 2021 • 7 tweets • 6 min read • Read on X

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@ZellaQuixote

If you woke up this morning hoping that somewhere in the world there was a Twitter botnet advertising multiplayer games by replying to tweets (many of them several years old) that have nothing to do with video games, this spam network's for you. #SundaySpam

cc: @ZellaQuixote

This network consists of 45 accounts created between February and June 2020. Almost all of their content (23574 of 24125 tweets, 97.7%) is repetitive replies promoting video games, most of which link to gameexp(dot)com.

At least 23 (probably 25) of the accounts in this network use GAN-generated profile pics. (GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique behind the fake faces produced by thispersondoesnotexist.com etc.) Many have had their colors edited, and 10 have been resized/cropped.

@HannahS21386602

Some of the accounts have profile pics that at first appear to be solid colors. When one increases the level of contrast, two of them (@HannahS21386602 and @RachelA32981013) appear to be faces. We believe these are GAN-generated but due to the lack of detail can't be 100% sure.

@EmmaVanvitelli

Some of the GAN-generated face pics used by this network are used by multiple accounts, with modifications to make them superficially unique.

• @EmmaVanvitelli, @MarinaOvadia, and @SarahBa76005930 have the same pic
• @iXtaktJLC1baCbu and @MaraDoloresMad2 have the same pic

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1265499541861797890

The resizing/cropping throws off techniques for detecting GAN-generated images that depend on the position of the major facial features, but other anomalies remain: some of the resized images feature nonsensical hats/clothing/earrings/glasses, for example.

https://twitter.com/conspirator0/status/1265499541861797890

Here's the result of blending all 25 GAN pics after reversing the modifications to the 10 that had been cropped/resized based on position of the left eye and the distance between eyes, which results in other facial features aligning as they would had the images not been modified.

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More from @conspirator0

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

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…

The most common problem with news articles about fake accounts: failure to include any examples of fake accounts or evidence of their inauthenticity. Any or all of these headlines might be accurate, but you can't tell from the articles, due to absence of evidence.

A related issue: articles like the "Nearly Half of Biden/Trump's Followers Are Fake" and "Nearly Half Of Accounts Tweeting About Coronavirus Are Bots" pieces base their numbers on closed-source third party tools, which may or may not actually be detecting anything useful.

Read 6 tweets

Conspirador Norteño

@conspirator0

Apr 26

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
conspirator0.com/p/how-to-talk-…

For this experiment, Meta’s Llama 3.1 model was asked to add and multiply random numbers between 10 and 100, with six different wordings: polite, rude, obsequious, urgent, and short and long neutral forms. Each combination of math operation and wording was tested 1000 times.

Results: asking the questions neutrally yielded a faster response than asking politely, rudely, obsequiously, or urgently, even if the neutral prompt was longer. Overall, obsequious math questions took the longest to process, followed by urgent, rude, and polite questions.

Read 6 tweets

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.