It's February, and a group of accounts with GAN-generated profile pics are tweeting identical "Merry Christmas" tweets promoting some kind of NFT giveaway.
(GAN = "generative adversarial network", the AI technique used by thispersondoesnotexist.com to produce fake faces)
These accounts are part of a spam network consisting of (at least) 6105 accounts created in February 2022, mostly in large batches. All have GAN-generated profile pics. The same names are reused across accounts - the 6105 accounts only have 25 unique first names between them.
The GAN-generated face pics produced by tools like thispersondoesnotexist.com have the telltale trait that the major facial features (particularly the eyes) are in the same position on every image. This becomes obvious when the images are blended together.
Despite the fact that one can generate as many unique GAN faces as one desired, this spam network frequently uses the same fake face on multiple accounts.
The accounts in this network have followed several accounts en masse, mostly metaverse and/or NFT-themed. Former Ukraine President Petro @Poroshenko, current US President Joe Biden (@POTUS), and Tesla founder @elonmusk also turn up.
The accounts in this network (allegedly) tweet exclusively via the Twitter Web App. Their tweet content is a mix of original tweets, retweets, and replies.
The "original" content tweeted by this network consists of two tweets that have been repeated verbatim by hundreds of the accounts. (One of these tweets is the February "Merry Christmas" NFT giveaway tweet mentioned earlier.)
The network's retweets are also repetitive - almost all retweets are of the same four NFT/crypto tweets. The network's replies are all brief threads containing the phrase "Fishing Free NFTs" and tagging @Fishing_Crypto and large numbers of seemingly random accounts.
More information on GAN-generated profile pics in this compliation of threads:
12 questions for @TheDailyBeast regarding @JakeLahut's false April 2023 story, "How Ron DeSantis Is Taking a Page Out of Nixon’s Playbook", which (among other things) falsely portrays an AI-generated face as a "sexually graphic meme" of a real child.
@JoannaColes @TracyConnor
First, some background and a couple debunks of the false article, for those unfamiliar with the situation:
1. How did the decision to use serial fabulist Steven Jarvis as a source for this article come about?
2. Was anyone employed by or affiliated with The Daily Beast at the time the article was published aware of Steven Jarvis's extensive history of making false claims?
It's New Year's Eve, and a bunch of politics enthusiasts with GAN-generated faces are enthusiastically replying to a variety of posts with similarly-worded replies. #NewYearShenaniGANs
cc: @ZellaQuixote
The politics enthusiasts are part of a spam network consisting of (at least) 575 accounts created between May and December 2023 with GAN-generated faces. Many of their handles, such as @Maairiuieinaaa and @eJooeiaAoneueer, contain long strings of vowels.
@Maairiuieinaaa @eJooeiaAoneueer All 575 of these accounts use StyleGAN-generated faces as profile images. Some of these, such as @MauMoiagaia's profile image, contain a tiny "StyleGAN 2 (Karras et al.)" watermark in the lower right corner.
It's a great day to look at a network of inauthentic accounts that post identical AI art images (with a side of good old fashioned T-shirt spam).
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This network consists of 24 X accounts. 12 of these accounts were created in the latter half of 2023 and have female avatars, while the other 12 were created in 2013 or earlier and have male avatars.
The 12 accounts with female avatars and 2023 creation dates regularly post AI-generated art images, and these image posts are quickly reposted by other accounts in the network (both female and male). The AI-generated images are often duplicated across accounts.
Meet @ImJamesMiller (permanent ID 1371651462153994242), an account with a GAN-generated face, 172K followers, and no tweets prior to two days ago. What's up with that?
cc: @ZellaQuixote
As it turns out, @ImJamesMiller wasn't always named @ImJamesMiller. In June, the account was named @/IamJimCaviezel in an apparent attempt to impersonate Sound of Freedom actor Jim Caviezel.
@ImJamesMiller Multiple prominent users appear to have accepted the fake Jim Caviezel account as legitimate, including Texas Congressman Brian Babin, right-wing influencer/ex-Game of Thrones blogger Jack Posobiec, and recently indicted ex-Assistant Attorney General Jeff Clark.
It's a great day to look at a network of Bluesky spam accounts with randomized names. #SundaySpam
cc: @ZellaQuixote
This spam network consists of (at least) 401 accounts, all of which were created (or added to the Bluesky app view) in August 2023. These accounts do not follow each other; rather, each one follows a small number of popular Bluesky accounts.
The accounts in this network cycle rhythmically between posting three types of content:
• reposts
• posts containing links to news articles
• posts containing links to news articles accompanied by images