A selfie of tearful 42-year-old woman holding a colorful birthday cake bears the caption "Today is my 42nd birthday, no husband, no children, I baked the cake by myself…" Neither the woman nor the cake is real. It's an AI-generated image designed to turn sympathy into profit on Facebook.
These "sadcore" posts, as reported in Newslttrs, represent a growing ecosystem of AI-generated content farms. Other popular images include impossibly detailed wooden sculptures with captions like "My grandfather made this, but no one seems to like his work" and implausibly tiny animals in precarious situations.
The images are obviously artificial to anyone familiar with AI artifacts, but they consistently generate thousands of sympathetic comments and, more importantly, direct payments.
The economics work through multiple revenue streams. Some posts collect small payments through Facebook's "stars" system, where each star is worth about a penny. "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," the article notes. Other posts funnel traffic to ad-filled websites or sell "guest posts" to other spammers through marketplaces like Fiverr.
"It's a self-sustaining economy of shit all the way down," the article says. "AI spam posts build up a content page until it can sell its service to other AI spammers."
Previously:
• Facebook is paying people to make the AI slop that infests it
