How did this tweet from #Texit supporter and lieutenant governor candidate @TheTexianDM get more retweets than likes, mostly from accounts with GAN-generated profile pics?
Answer: @TheTexianDM's tweet was retweeted by an botnet consisting of (at least) 1081 accounts created in September, October, or November 2021. All 1081 accounts tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web app, and almost all of their tweets are retweets. #astroturf
The accounts in this network mostly retweet cryptocurrency/blockchain/NFT content, but there are exceptions - gaming accounts, musicians, and political accounts turn up as well.
All 1081 accounts in this network use GAN-generate face pics as their profile pics, similar to those produced by thispersondoesnotexist.com.
GAN-generated face pics (at least so far) have the telltale trait that the major facial features (particularly the eyes) are always rendered in the same position on the image. This becomes obvious when one blends the 1081 images used by the botnet together:
Other potential indicators of GAN-generated face pics include nonsensical clothing and hats made of abstract colorful blobs rather than any real material. GAN-generated "sports caps" will often have random colorful debris where the team logo would be on a real hat.
GAN-generated face pics also sometimes have trippy backgrounds that often superficially resemble buildings or outdoor scenes but that turns out to be composed of abstract shapes and blobs of varying colors when one looks more closely.
Additionally, vestigial heads near the edges of the image (sometimes referred to as "side demons") and malformed glasses or goggles that sometimes blend into the face or are unrealistically asymmetrical are also fingerprints of GAN-generated pics.
Permanent IDs for the 1081 accounts in this network, in case anyone wants them. (A few are already suspended.) pastebin.com/5TY22SC8
More information on GAN-generated pics and their use on (mostly) Twitter in this compendium o' threads:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The spammers behind the "Barndominium Gallery" Facebook page have branched out into AI-generated video and started a YouTube channel with the catchy name "AY CUSTOM HOME". The results are just about as craptastic as you'd expect.
In this synthetically generated aerial video of a (nonexistent) barndominium under construction, the geometry of the roof changes, a blue building appears, and a tree vanishes, all in the course of just three seconds.
This AI-generated barndominium features a long AI-generated porch with some chairs on it. Exactly how many chairs there are depends on what angle you look at it from, however, as the chair on the left splits into three chairs as the camera pans.