30 minutes on Facebook
If you like AI-generated images and renamed accounts, you'll just love the current state of the Facebook recommendation algorithm
Although I don’t post on Facebook myself, I do have a couple of throwaway accounts that I use in order to peruse the site from time to time. In recent months, I’ve anecdotally noticed a sharp increase in the number of AI-generated images that Facebook’s recommendation algorithms are showing me, so I embarked upon a brief experiment. Using an account that I’d previously used almost exclusively to window shop for guitars, basses, and other music gear, I simply scrolled down for 30 minutes and collected the raw HTML of the set of posts I was served, as well as the “Page Transparency” sections of the accounts that posted them. The results do not paint a favorable picture of the current state of Facebook’s recommendation systems, as almost all of this content was visual clickbait, much of it AI-generated, and less than five percent of the posts I was shown were related to music, the primary topic I’d expressed interest in via my past browsing habits.
Over the course of half an hour of scrolling, Facebook served 1078 posts from 616 distinct accounts, 137 of which (12.7%) were marked as sponsored ads. The remaining posts were mostly a mix of AI-generated images and plagiarized photographs posted by content aggregator accounts with large numbers of followers. Per the page transparency information provided by Facebook, 258 of the 616 accounts (41.9%) that posted this content have been renamed at least once, a possible sign of account takeover (or of spammers trying out different content strategies). Renamed accounts were responsible for 473 of the 1078 posts (43.9%).
Despite having used the test account almost exclusively to browse pages related to musical instruments prior to this experiment, I was served very little material relevant to this topic; only 53 of 1078 posts (4.9%) were in any way related to music or musical equipment. Given that targeting advertising is one of Facebook’s revenue streams, the lack of content related to products in which I have shown interest is an odd result.
237 of the 1078 posts I was served (22%) contained AI-generated images, two of which appeared in sponsored ads. These AI-generated images were posted by 100 distinct accounts, most of which have specific themes and continually post AI-generated images related to these themes, with occasional plagiarized photos thrown in for good measure. Many of these accounts are house-themed pages, such as “Barndominium Gallery”, “Log Cabin Ideas”, and “Mountain Cabins Life”. Others focus on artificially generated images of things such as scenery, food, campfires, and occasionally Keanu Reeves.
Many of these images have obvious anomalies that reveal their artificial origin, such as the improbably-long truck with thousands of U.S. flags driving the wrong way down a freeway. Images of buildings generally contain surreal construction elements, such as windows with distorted frames, or lines that should be straight but inexplicably curve. Lane markers (and sometimes entire lanes) on roads mysteriously vanish and reappear.
Several of the images include nonsensical text, such as the exit signs in the aforementioned truck image, the road signs in various scenery photos, and the text on bottles in various images of meals. More outlandish anomalies, seen in the image at the top of this article, include a massive branch hovering in midair in defiance of gravity, a train that physically passes through multiple trees in defiance of several laws of physics, and an apparent attempt at creating an athletic field where people can play every known sport simultaneously. Some of the images can be traced back to galleries of AI-generated images using TinEye or Google reverse image search.
Two of the AI-generated posts I encountered were served as sponsored ads, both of which depicted lakeside sunset scenes. One of the ads, from “Cabins Lovers”, shows a scene of two chairs facing toward the water, with some lanterns nearby. Don’t get too comfortable, though, because due to the magic of generative AI, the chairs are already occupied by large blurry gray trapezoids. This sponsored post had been liked 5482 times as of June 13th, 2024.
The other sponsored post is from “Ali Brigginshaw”, and is misrepresented via hashtag as nature photography. This image features a raging campfire in which the wood is miraculously unburnt, which raises some questions about how the flames are possible in the first place. There are some oddities in the geometry of the stones as well, both in the fire pit and the surrounding benches. This sponsored post had been liked 12627 times as of June 13th, 2024.
