Thousands of bizarre images of Jesus Christ are generated by artificial intelligence on Facebook. The network's algorithm promotes them, and some become viral and manage to attract huge audiences for pages that then take advantage of their success to monetize or even scam users.

"Images are compelling, some are sensational, and some are just weird," says Renée DiResta, a researcher at Stanford University and co-author of a March paper on this phenomenon. The academic article has studied 120 Facebook pages that have published at least 50 AI-generated images each and found that the pages had an average of almost 130,000 followers. The ones that EL PAS has identified are the ones that are most likely to have been created by AI and that have the highest audience reach. The results of the study were published in the journal Artificial Intelligence and Social Networking (AI&S) on March 17, 2024. Scam accounts occasionally interact with gullible commenters on posts, both on pages and in groups. Once an audience is created in a group or page, the ways of trying to extract benefits vary. Spam pages take advantage of attention to direct users to pages outside of Facebook that are filled with ads. In the third quarter of 2023, one of the 20 most viewed images on Facebook globally was this kitchen with a glass floor. It had 40 million views and 1.9 million interactions, according to the platform's quarterly report on its most viewed content. Some of the pages that try this trap also try animals, children, cabins, or landscapes, anything that might attract attention on Facebook. The scam pages that use these tactics often change their names and keep their followers to do something else or sell the audience. They often try to trick followers by stealing, buying or changing control of the page; two, falsely state a name, address, or other identifying characteristic; and/or, three, sell fake products.