The low stakes fake AI content
Fake Nazis, fake penguins and fake heavy handed political metaphors
Before starting Explainable I verified, and often debunked, content found on social media. There’s a lot of crossover from that work with sifting through the world of AI-generated content, so today I pulled together some AI images that have gone viral in recent months. Because of *gestures to the hard news cycle* I kept it light, these are all efforts that are more likely to pop up on your boomer relative’s Facebook feed than in any serious debate about online misinformation. It would be great if there was more widespread understanding about how to detect fakes, and it would be great if most social media platforms didn’t reward sharing obvious fakes, but all the below is not going to cause the downfall of civilization. Though it may erode our trust in penguin content.
No, the Nazis did not find alien artifacts
At the time of writing, this was on over 720 reposts on X, formerly Twitter. It was created for Instagram account infiniteodyssey.mag, another player in the nascent alternate reality scene on Instagram that has been popularized by AI tools. The disclaimer on the original upload reads, “WRITTEN BY A.I. NOT A REAL INFORMATION. Experience the world’s first Sci-Fi Magazine created entirely by A.I.”
So, in short, there is a new form of historical fan-fic springing up mainly on Instagram that is then shared context-free on other platforms, though mainly going viral on X, formerly Twitter.
Bigfoot returns
I like this one. It’s titled ‘The Giants That Built America’. Just a bunch of Sasquatches chilling on camera with serious-looking 19th-century Americans. But it’s 2023 so, of course, this slideshow has gone viral on Twitter on an account called RealTimeHistry. See also: black and white grainy images of dragons and aliens doing numbers.
The AI is coming for our penguin and owl content
The cute penguin selfie is AI. I’m sorry, but not that sorry. Animal content aggregator accounts have a world of cute animal content to choose from, they should use that! I wasn’t able to find the original creator of this one, but it has appeared everywhere a cute animal gets shared for likes throughout the year. Beyond penguins not being noted operators of consumer electronics, the little lad on the right has four feet, which is a red flag. So jot that down. The always reliable Hoax Eye X account says it was made with Stable Diffusion so I’m happy to go with that. It’s not just penguins getting the viral AI treatment, four-legged owls are very popular too.
All of nature, really
For penguins and owls, see all of nature. Have you watched a single episode of Planet Earth? There’s no shortage of content, we’re golden content-wise for the moment. But that’s not stopping the garish AI efforts from sneaking in. This one is available, albeit clearly marked as AI, on Getty Images.
Visual metaphors, incoming
If you see any heavy-handed visual metaphors for the state of the world today there’s a good chance you’re looking at a pareidolia image using Stable-Diffusion. A variation on the recent trend of adding hidden messages to AI images, this effort features Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
It burns, it burns
I particularly like this one because of the caption. It is not a real event. These are not real images. There is no extreme sunburn competition in Florida, or anywhere in the United States. Though Florida is absolutely the correct state to use when making up such a claim.
None of these are high-stakes instances of misinformation. They just adding to the pile of shaggy dog stories on social. It’s still a little worrying though, if people can easily fall for the silly stuff, how much resilience is there for the malicious stuff?