James Francis

Have you heard of "shrimp Jesus"? It's an eerie phenomenon on Facebook: surreal pictures portraying the religious figure, often with shrimp or Korean flight attendants – all generated with AI. There are other examples, too, such as impoverished kids making incredible sculptures and small pets doing utterly ridiculous things. These might border on unbelievable, but they are flooding Facebook groups.

Con artists are using AI images to drive up massive volumes of Facebook traffic. They also use bots to produce thousands of likes and comments under these posts – fooling Facebook's algorithms to drive more people towards such groups, where scammers snare human victims, often the elderly.