Bizarre AI images of Jesus crabs, dramatic plane crashes and old ladies baking cakes are becoming more and more familiar on sites such as Facebook, as bots spiral out of control. To find out what exactly is going on, we asked an expert where these images are coming from and how the deluge of artificial nonsense can be stopped.
The trend has taken off over the past month or so, with some Facebook pages popping up and posting dozens of images a day, and some of those getting hundreds of thousands of likes.
Despite this, University of New South Wales Professor and AI expert Toby Walsh told PEDESTRIAN.TV the likes, along with the images themselves, are probably fake.
“This is generative AI, I can’t imagine that’s the product of human imagination. It’s the product of AI’s imagination and I suspect its the start of the trend that increasingly the internet is going to be full of synthetic content,” he said.
“And then bots are going to be upvoting and downvoting synthetic content and we get these interesting, strange, odd feedback loops that take us off in weird directions.”
Absolutely the stuff of nightmares.
Walsh said that it starts with one image getting likes, only for other bots to then copy each other until it has surpassed a point where the images make sense. And while Jesus crabs may seem harmless, there are potentially harmful consequences to the spread of information further down the road.
“Twitter is full of bots, Facebook is full of bots and soon there’s going to be more bots than people,” he said.
“If we just do nothing we’re going to see more of this, and there is a real danger already — 2024 will be the year that we stop believing photographs, because it’s now so easy to edit photographs that you can’t trust what it is.”
Walsh said that at some point governments were going to have to step in, a move already seen in the United States when the Federal Government banned the use of robocalls following bots phoning people up and persuading them not to vote.
New legal requirements in some parts of the world also require platforms to identify if content is AI generated. Platforms may even take such steps themselves, such as the Community Notes feature on X (formerly Twitter) which helps combat false information.
For now though, as Jesus crabs continue to spread and mutate, never has there been a better time to keep your grandma away from the computer.
