Sometimes inauthentic accounts are difficult to spot, but this is not one of those times. @CheiaKeeta (permanent ID 1432532435338629124) has helpfully used the #NewProfilePic hashtag to document a history of stealing multiple people's photos and using them as profile pics.
Although @CheiaKeeta claims to be an ICU nurse in New York, the two "nurse selfies" posted by the account depict two different people, neither of whom appears to work in a New York ICU. (@CheiaKeeta removed name/employer info from the pics in a possible attempt at obfuscation.)
Casting additional doubt on @CheiaKeeta's claims to be a New York ICU nurse is a tweet stating that 33 COVID patients died in @CheiaKeeta's unit on Sept 30, 2021. Since the entirety of NYC experienced 19 COVID deaths on the day in question, this appears to be false.
Another problem: in order to work 15 years as a nurse while not having been born in the 1980s, @CheiaKeeta would've had to have graduated nursing school at age 16 or younger.
The @CheiaKeeta account's use of stolen photos doesn't stop with "selfies" and profile pics. @CheiaKeeta's photo shoot from last year and the alleged photos of @CheiaKeeta's pets are also plagiarized.
Unsurprisingly, both of @CheiaKeeta's alleged Christmas trees are random photos swiped from the Internet.
Since the account is politically focused, it's not surprising that @CheiaKeeta tweets about participating in protests and marches. The evidence of participation is fake, however - for example, this photo @CheiaKeeta allegedly took at a march in 2021 is actually from 2017.
Additionally, it is extremely unlikely that @CheiaKeeta's father is both a judge and 30-year FBI veteran. Also, prosecutors don't generally bring their own children with them to the courtroom for shits and giggles.
Also in the "extremely unlikely" department, @CheiaKeeta supposedly received a COVID vaccine booster in September, again in October, and yet again in November.
Despite the obvious inauthenticity of many aspects of the @CheiaKeeta account, it is being promoted frequently on follow lists - mostly on the political left, but also here and there on the right.
Although there exists ample reason to suspect certain members of Congress of participation in/foreknowledge of the January 6th insurrection, Ted Cruz and Joe Manchin are not among them. Despite this, @CheiaKeeta has multiple tweets alleging or insinuating their involvement.
One more thing: this does not appear to be the first attempt to create this fake persona. A similar-looking "nurse" account named @cheecierom (now suspended) helped push the "Bill Barr tried to visit Ghislaine Maxwell in jail" nonsense in July 2020.
In a possibly interesting coincidence, the first account to tweet the July 2020 Maxwell/Barr disinformation (@Baligubadle1, presently protected) is the first smaller account (fewer than 100,000 followers) that @CheiaKeeta followed.
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.
Some observations regarding @Botted_Likes (permanent ID 1459592225952649221)...
First, "viral posts which don't result in follower growth and have very little engagement in the reply section" is not a useful heuristic for detecting botted likes. Why not?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
"Viral posts that do not result in follower growth" is not a valid test for botting, because posts from large accounts often go viral among the large account's existing followers but do not reach other audiences, resulting in high like/repost counts but little/no follower growth.
"Very little engagement in the reply section" doesn't work for multiple reasons (some topics spur debate and some don't, some people restrict replies, etc)
Hilariously, @Botted_Likes seems to be ignoring their own criteria, as many of the posts they feature have tons of replies.
As with the banned @emywinst account, the @kamala_wins47 account farms engagement by reposting other people's videos, accompanied by bogus claims that the videos have been deleted from Twitter. These video posts frequently garner massive view counts.
@Emywinst @kamala_wins47 The operator of the @kamala_wins47 account generally follows up these viral video posts with one or more replies advertising T-shirts sold on bestusatee(dot)com. This strategy is identical to that used by the banned @emywinst account.
What's up with all these similarly-worded enthusiastic posts about a Pierre Poilievre rally in Kirkland Lake, and are they all from accounts that are less than a month old? (Spoiler: yes, they are.) #Spamtastic
cc: @ZellaQuixote
An X search for "Pierre Poilievre", "Kirkland Lake", and "refreshing" performed on August 4th, 2024 turned up 151 posts from 151 accounts. All are new accounts, with the oldest having been created less than a month ago, on July 7th, 2024. (Some have since been suspended by X.)
The most intense period of activity for this group of accounts was on August 3rd, 2024, when the repetitive posts about the Poilievre rally were posted. Each account also has at least one earlier post on a random topic; some of these older posts seem to cut off abruptly.