404 Media has been pulling the thread of the great mystery of "What the heck is going on with all this AI image spam on Facebook?" Over the last few months, they've reported on various versions of AI people doing chainsaw carvings, children showing off bicycles made of vegetables, old people blowing out birthday cakes, dying or mutilated children, and my personal favorite: Shrimp Jesus.
The question I'm left with is why is Facebook allowing this? 404 Media's report notes that occasionally, Meta will take action against certain pages, but only in really specific cases — like with a hacked account and when it removed AI-generated images of disfigured children. Those probably ran afoul of some other existing content guidelines.
It's an election year, and Facebook has bigger content-moderation issues to deal with.
The images themselves are mostly benign, and the individual images don't run afoul of content guidelines. Shrimp Jesus is absurd, and things like it may ruin the Facebook experience in the long run, but for now, it's not really an issue of violating the content rules.
Engagement bait isn't necessarily a banned tactic, either. Nothing says you can't post lots of engaging content to trick boomers (and others) into commenting. There are ways to violate the rules with certain spam tactics, but maybe these AI-fueled accounts aren't crossing the line.
Facebook will start to detect and label some AI-generated images, but there's no rule that says you can't post something just because it's AI-generated. (When I asked about how they're handling these, a rep for Meta pointed me to their announcement of this policy.)
(404 Media's theory): Meta is so invested in AI that it wants us to get used to seeing AI images, and so they're willing to let it go.