Biblical plague on Facebook: flooded by AI pictures of Jesus figure | Tech

A Jesus made of sand or bunches of bananas. Or eggs. A shrimp with the head of Jesus. And pictures of Jesus on the cross in front of a gigantic American flag and a group of soldiers. On Facebook you will find thousands of these types of pictures created by AI.

The pages where the images are shared have thousands of followers. Pictures showing a sculpture of a Jesus figure, for example consisting of hundreds of plastic bottles, contain texts such as: “Made with my own hands!”

Other pictures have random hashtags like MeganFox , cabincrew and ScarlettJohansson . In the comments you always come across one word: amen.

What on earth is happening here? Researcher Renée DiResta of the Stanford Internet Observatory looked at 120 Facebook pages that contained AI-generated images. Together the images had been viewed hundreds of millions of times.

The bizarre pages are not completely innocent, says DiResta. “Some pages are created by scammers trying to contact people to obtain information or sell products that don’t exist.”

Other pages try to lure people to an external site. Some pages are linked to groups where people are lured to, after which they see advertisements for products.

The pictures are deliberately bizarre, so that they attract a lot of attention. “On social media, attention is traded,” says Professor of Media Studies Mark Deuze of the University of Amsterdam. “It’s all about clicks and hits. It seems like a lot of these types of accounts are looking for a lot of attention quickly so they can be resold.”

These types of images of Jesus can help with this. Because the crazier it is, the more likely you are to share it with others. AI expert Remy Gieling calls the images strange and fascinating, but also to be expected.

“With artificial intelligence, you can create thousands of images that fall within a specific niche in the blink of an eye,” he says. “So also of Jesus as a potato in a field in Africa.”

The question remains whether people will be involved in filling the Facebook pages. According to Gieling, it is quite simple to completely automate that process.

Even the “amen” responses seem to come from the computer, although there is no evidence of that. “But we do see that many of those pages are suddenly growing quickly,” says DiResta. “That usually points to fake accounts and click farms, so we assume that at least some of the comments are fake.”

A click farm is a form of fraud in which companies are hired to respond to messages using various accounts. These messages then have a greater chance of being further distributed via Facebook’s algorithm. They do not have to do this manually either, this can also be done with the help of AI.

This way you get new wine in old bottles, says Deuze. Human influencers are often part of a network of other influencers. They also share each other’s messages and leave comments. “Add AI to that and you get the same principle, but different on steroids.”

Jesus is not the only subject of the AI ​​images. There are pictures of nature in which you can discover patterns. Or animals that seem to form words together. There are even AI images of malnourished and deformed children.

Facebook did not respond to questions from NU.nl. The company has been difficult to reach since the spokesperson left the Netherlands. Researcher DiResta knows that Facebook has removed a number of the pages investigated. According to her, these violated Meta’s rules regarding spammers, scams and manipulative coordinated behavior.

Meta previously indicated that it would label AI-generated images as such. That should happen from this month onwards. The labels should make it clear to all users when images have been tampered with.

People may pay little heed to such a label. But according to AI expert Gieling, they can ensure that the Facebook algorithm shows the images less quickly in the overview of users.

A pleasant thought with a view to the future. Because in the coming years there will be many more online messages, images and videos generated with AI, Gieling thinks. “As a result, we will likely increasingly desire media created by humans.”