Naughty bots have been around for years, flooding the internet, and your inbox, with spam and scams.
But since AI has become more and more advanced, there is a new problem emerging. The rise of the AI spambots.
And some of them aren’t even malicious, they’re just pumping out AI-generated content to farm for engagement.
So, why should you care? Well, a heck of a lot of people don’t seem to know the content they are engaging with is AI generated, and in addition, there will be an army of AI bots and hacked accounts interacting with the post, boosting engagement further.
It was already difficult to stand out on social media. And with channels now being flooded with this cack, it’s only going to get harder.
It’s not like social platforms aren’t aware of the issue, either. Elon Musk stated ‘Any accounts doing engagement farming will be suspended and traced to source’. But as anyone who has spent much time on X (Twitter) recently will tell you, it’s not working. Replies are flooded with either blue tick spammers, or bots, some of which are sharing VERY explicit sexual content.
Facebook looks to be faring even worse. Research conducted by Stanford and Georgetown University indicates that Facebook is more than likely rewarding AI spam accounts for flooding feeds with more than 50 AI-generated images a day, generating millions of impressions.
With an older demographic, it does seem that the boomer generation is not as good at identifying what is legit content, and what has been AI-generated. Even when to most people, it’s obvious that it simply cannot be a real image.
Let’s look at some examples.
Happy Birthday!
Jesus Christ.
USA! USA! USA!
Twitter doesn’t seem to have the same issues with the insane images that crop up on Facebook, but the bots love to spam comments.
Twitter’s AI bot problem:
Pic 1: spam account posts AI-generated *description* of an image without the image.
Pics 2-4
Swarms of blue-check verified bots reply with equally generated replies complimenting the nonexistent image.h/t @chrismohney pic.twitter.com/5qtq1rwaLB
— John Scott-Railton (@jsrailton) February 3, 2024
This is clearly not a good thing for marketers. Not only is there the issue of fighting against the noise made by these spam bots, there is also a problem with them spamming comments, making it harder to identify who is a real person (that may require a response or acknowledgement) and who is not.
With social media platforms fighting a losing battle against AI bots, will these channels end up being completely taken over by robots all chatting with each other, and creating and posting increasingly mad images? One researcher predicts that by 2026, 90% of internet content will be AI-generated. I hope they’re wrong, but as AI gets more advanced, maybe after a while, we won’t even be able to tell the difference.
