How Spammers and Scammers Leverage AI-Generated Images on Facebook for Audience Growth

Much of the research and discourse on risks from artificial intelligence (AI) image generators, such as DALL-E and Midjourney, has centered around whether they could be used to inject false information into political discourse. We show that spammers and scammers - seemingly motivated by profit or clout, not ideology - are already using AI-generated images to gain significant traction on Facebook. At times, the Facebook Feed is recommending unlabeled AI-generated images to users who neither follow the Pages posting the images nor realize that the images are AI-generated, highlighting the need for improved transparency and provenance standards as AI models proliferate.