Please stop sharing AI-generated "Hurricane Helene" images!

Surely you've seen those creepy, uncanny valley-triggering images of Hurricane Helene rescue efforts featuring pets, children, and more—even Donald Trump wading into the floodwaters or repairing cellphone towers—cluttering up your Facebook feeds. I hope you've recognized them as AI and haven't liked nor shared them. But if you have inadvertently shared any, please stop doing so—you're only facilitating user engagement, which generates advertising revenue that is most definitely not going to helping the victims of the hurricane.

As a 404 Media investigation into the growing slop phenomenon found earlier this year, most of this stuff is expressly designed to infiltrate Facebook's algorithm to garner engagement and advertising revenue.

It's a slimy business that's making the internet worse for everyone. And now, in a disturbing turn, AI slop posters are going after natural disasters as well . . . 

It's [Facebook] also not flagging the posts as AI-generated and is instead presenting them as if they're real images of a disaster zone.

In other words, it's hard to look at these fake pictures of destruction in Asheville as anything other than yet another ploy to get people to buy AI-generated pictures of Santa in the Outer Banks. And if that's indeed the case, it would be an insidious use of AI to clog up information pathways in the aftermath of a deadly natural disaster.

Futurism

If you need some help learning how to spot AI images, here are some tips from How-To Geek, which include checking fine details on human images like fingers, objects that people are holding, glasses, and hair—AI is notoriously bad at such details. How-To Geek also advises examining details on inanimate objects, including how various materials intersect or (fail to) line up correctly. Finally, AI images also often have trouble with portraying lighting in ways that match reality.

If you want to help victims of Hurricane Helene, here's a list of legitimate organizations you can donate to, instead of generating advertising revenue for Facebook.

Previously:
Facebook is paying people to make the AI slop that infests it