I put my heart and soul into this AI but nobody cares

Social media has always been home to clickbait, fake photos, tall stories and gullible chumps. And now, thanks to generative AI, you can have all those joys without any of the tedious creativity.

First up is a category I call "carve the other one, it's got bells on"

Above are three images from recent Facebook posts. Each depicts a supposed wooden sculpture along the proud person who created them. Of course, they are all AI generated. They're all captioned with some kind of engagement bait : "My grandfather made this, but unfortunately no one seems to like his work" or "I built a monument to my mother"

Next, we have the seminal type of this kind of AI spam : "Baking sadcore"

Two screenshots showing women posing behind colourful birthday cakes that they allegedly baked themselves. The first one is apparently a forty-two year old woman who is crying because she has no husband or children; the second is a woman clearly no older than eighty but whom the caption claims is 105.

And finally, the third category, the ever popular "implausibly cute and/or suffering animals"

Three more screenshots: the first has either an implausibly small baby or an unfeasibly large kitten snuggled up together in the middle of a country road, the second a mother cat and seven AI generated kittens and finally a laughably skinny polar bear with its entire rib cage pretty much on the outside of its body.

Now, to any person who has ever seen an AI image or indeed seen anything in the real world, you'd think it would be obvious that these are fake images. Nobody would seriously engage with this content. And yet, other each of this images there are hundreds, sometimes thousands of positive comments. Particularly with the sadcore ones, people are commenting words of praise and admiration to the non-existent subjects who are weeping over their creations.

So braindead and stereotypical are these comments that you might think they are themselves AI generated. But, picking a few at random, I checked out their profiles and they seem genuine. I didn't find any that showed up as duplicates of real people and they all had what seemed to be real people amongst their connections. They did also all seem to be active churchgoers but that must be some kind of coincidence...

But why would anyone want to post this obviously fake content and beguile internet simpletons? Why does anyone do any kind of con? For the money. Bizarre as it may seem, some people actually send real money to these "creators"

Those ten stars that the person above sent are worth a penny each. Not a huge amount of money but repeated across hundreds of images with thousands of comments each it could start adding up to real income. Most of these AI spam pages are based in low cost countries where the nickels and dimes of outrageous internet content go far further.

Even those pages that don't shill worthless "stars" can still cash in on the gullible. These AI images are just the latest tool in the chest of so-called "content farms" that seek out ever more "engagement". Sad bakers, impossible tree sculptors and emaciated animals join the erstwhile clickbaits of old : listicles ("you won't believe number 7"), out-of-context images of celebrities with misleading captions and of course the OG "hot singles in your area are waiting to contact you!"

People engage with these posts, click through to the content farm where ever more absurdity awaits and, most importantly, where advertising units can be placed and revenue generated. It's all a numbers game. These sites aren't going to generate much ad revenue per page view or per visitor but, once again, if you can get enough traffic you can start to make money.

And then there are opportunities to sell "guest posts" to other spam merchants who want to get their content in front of gullible eyeballs. Marketplaces like fiverr are dominated by content farmers who will put your post into their social media feeds. It's a self-sustaining economy of shit all the way down. AI spam posts build up a content page until it can sell it's service to other AI spammers.

Of course, there is still real content, generated by real people on the internet. The article you've just read is one such example. If you'd like to support me, join the mailing list below.

I'll be ever so grateful if you do sign up and I've asked my dog to bake you a cake in return. He puts his heart and soul into it but no one ever tells him he's a good boy.