Another fun trip to Facebook’s mirror house.
Whole Forbes
Long live HOLE FOBE.
From shrimp Jesus to an 18-wheeler truck full of babies, Facebook is flooded with weird, algorithmically hungry AI-generated images. These weird images are published en masse by spammers who use AI-generated images with incoherent captions begging for likes and shares. A few months into the phenomenon, certain themes seem to have taken shape. Many of these images have religious themes, many feature avant-garde interpretations of Jesus, many depict soldiers and veterans, many attempt to depict poor people, and many feature babies and children (there are other categories where things like pit bull mermaids fall into).
Another motif that has emerged is of crying police officers carrying Bibles as the floodwaters rise. See this recently posted image, which shows a fake cop in waist-deep water carrying a “HOLE FOBE” sign that’s been altered by AI to read “Bible.”
“Why aren’t these photos going viral?” the poster lamented in the caption, followed by a series of emojis (the image has received tens of thousands of reactions). The caption continues with “Beautiful flight attendants” and lists the names of celebrities, mostly female, with hashtags.
Naturally, variations on this theme also include a painting of a child police officer clutching a large gold crucifix as the floodwaters roll in. Moving piece!
Room on the raft
If you take a look at the comments section of posts like this one, you’ll see that while some people aren’t happy with the image, others are.
“Ah, yes, The Hole Fobe,” one sarcastic commenter wrote. “Great book.”
“I love reading Whole Pove,” joked another user.
“[Because] “Nobody wants to hear the word of God,” another person retorted, presumably in response to a question about why photos like this “never go viral.”
“Don’t cry, little girl…” added another Facebook user, “The Lord is with you.”
Because Facebook is a land of bots and synthetic images, it’s hard to gauge how much of the engagement the post has allegedly garnered (currently over 46,000 likes and nearly 1,000 shares) is genuine.
Yet the fact that posts like this one continue to be featured by Facebook’s algorithm feels like a dark sign of the social media site’s platform decline. Facebook now feels more like an empty, chaotic playground for scammers than a website for humans. If only there was room in that hole for Facebook to escape the AI ​​deluge.
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