Facebook’s Twisted Incentives Are Building Its Era of AI Slop

If you’ve spent any time on Facebook lately you’ve seen a river of AI slop. There’s a homeless vet with a bad sign, cops with big Bibles, and—of course—Shrimp Jesus. Why is Facebook full of these things? Because there is money in it, of course.

A new investigation from 404 Media captures the origins of Facebook’s AI slop era and reveals an ecosystem of YouTube videos, Telegram channels, and Google drives full of reels. It exists to automate the creation and distribution of AI-generated images on Facebook.

People in places like Pakistan, India, Vietnam, Thailand, and Indonesia use tools like Microsoft AI Image Creator to find content. They post dozens of photos every day, sometimes every hour, and make a living from marriage.

The goal is to get as many posts per day from as many accounts as possible. A regular posting account can be invited to Facebook’s Creator Bonus Program and start making money with viral content. Some posts will generate a few cents while others may pull in hundreds of dollars. The more posts, the bigger the profit. The goal is to use automation to post as many times as possible, sometimes hundreds of times a day.

As with all spam circles, there is another economy full of people who will sell you the tools and information you need to get started. There are YouTube channels dedicated to getting the AI ​​human slop machine working, dozens of guides on Fiverr and Gumroad, and Telegram channels full of simple English instructions that will help the AI ​​image generator create a normal image.

Some creators 404 Media uncovered were using multiple Facebook accounts and using automated tools to populate feeds with engagement spam. Using instructions and tools he bought online, Jason Koebler of 404 Media set up his own AI slop shop. Here’s how it works:

“First, the spammer creates a free Vercel account. Then they create a WordPress account and spam page, download code snippets from GitHub written by other spammers, modify it (there are guides for this on GumRoad and Fiverr; I bought guides from both), and upload it to them. Despatch of Vercel. Then they connect Vercel to a WordPress website using a specific WordPress plugin that effectively sets up a redirect between Vercel and the WordPress site. Then the person logs into their Facebook page and upgrades their account to an ad account, which is a quick process. Then the person goes through the process of buying and setting up an ad on Facebook that links to the Vercel screen of the page they want to link to.

All this action of Vercel is there to avoid the automatic spam detection of Facebook, because it finally closes the link of the website linked to it. Inside the ad manager, they upload an image modified to look like a Facebook gallery post (there are tools for this), then remove the title and description automatically generated by Facebook to make it look like a simple ad. picture not link. Then, they generate a preview of their ad. This creates a preview link, which can be pushed to their phone (must be a different device), then shared on their personal Facebook page as a ‘test.’

From there, the link can be captured and shared on the page as a regular post, or it is not a published advertisement, which means, to do this trick, you don’t actually have to spend any money. This process can be repeated many times so that people click on photo albums that are not photo albums. FewFeed recently created a feature that allows you to directly create these fake album-type photos.”

Profiting with AI slop is a technical process and Meta’s content moderation teams cannot keep up with the flood. Worse, they may not want to stop the whole grist-mill. Meta openly accepts AI-generated images and the only metrics it cares about are those that improve its bottom line. The more people share the post and engage with it, the better the Meta. A slop makes everyone money.

“We encourage creators to use AI tools to produce high-quality content that meets all of our Community Standards, and we take action against those who try to drive traffic using fake interactions whether they use AI or not,” a Meta spokesperson told 404 Media. “We know that bad actors are changing their tactics to avoid our rules, so we’re always working to improve our detection and enforcement.”

According to people who make slop, money changes life. Buried in the middle of the 404 Media story is an interesting exchange. In another podcast, a spammer showed an income tab. In this list was a picture of a train made of leaves. The spammer had earned $431 per photo engagement. “People don’t even make that much money a month,” said the interviewer.