Here's a brief history of the #NationalDivorce hashtag. First used almost a decade ago by obscure accounts, it has in recent years been tweeted by a ragtag lineup that includes #Calexit founder Louis J. Marinelli and QAnon Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The first tweet containing #NationalDivorce appears to be a November 2012 tweet from @RTsolideogloria, a now-dormant right-wing account. This was later followed by several tweets in 2013/2014 from left-wing account @StrongAmerican encouraging Texas to secede from the USA.
In 2017, right-wing pundit and Claremont Institute fellow @davereaboi began using the #NationalDivorce hashtag somewhat regularly. His tweets containing it were largely ignored until June 2020, however.
In November 2020, the official Twitter account of the #Calexit movement (@YesCalifornia) began tweeting the #NationalDivorce hashtag prolifically. Other California secessionist accounts, including Calexit founder @LouisJMarinelli, later followed suit.
The #NationalDivorce hashtag grew in popularity in 2021/2022, propelled by large right-wing accounts such as @DineshDSouza and Libertarian Party accounts such as @LPNH. Marjorie Taylor Greene used it in October 2021, on her now-banned @mtgreenee account.
Thus far, the most-retweeted tweets containing the #NationalDivorce hashtag are from popular right-wing influencers and official Libertarian Party accounts. Blue-check #Calexit account @YesCalifornia also turns up prominently, mostly due to having tweeted the hashtag 185 times.
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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.
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.