In recent years, Facebook has been flooded with a seemingly endless stream of AI-generated image spam depicting subjects ranging from Shrimp Jesus to Tesla Tiny Homes. Houses have been a perpetual theme, with pages such as “Barndominium Gallery” and “House Plans Gallery” racking up hundreds of thousands of followers simply by posting similar-looking AI-generated images of nonexistent houses over and over. In recent days, Facebook’s recommendation algorithm has been showing me a variation on this theme: AI-generated images of home interiors posted by random personal accounts with massive audiences.
The AI-generated images posted by the Facebook accounts in question almost all depict the alleged interiors of alleged homes, featuring various types of furniture and decor. These images generally have muted color schemes and feature items such as flowers, gourds, dishes, and candles. Although many of the images are superficially convincing, details such as unrealistic text and garbled reflections indicate that these are artificially-generated images rather than genuine photographs.
Unlike much of Facebook’s house-themed AI slop, which generally originates with large content farm accounts with names like “Barndominium Gallery” and “Gorgeous House Plans”, these AI-generated interior scenes are posted by what appear to be personal accounts. While the accounts in question show no overt signs of being hijacked, and the profile photos used appear real, the lineup of extremely similar content and the fact that most of the accounts follow and continually reply to one another suggests that their posting is coordinated. All of the accounts have tens or hundreds of thousands of followers, but only follow a handful of accounts themselves.
The majority of the AI-generated images posted by this set of Facebook accounts include account-specific watermarks, as shown above. The watermarks use similar fonts and feature the account operator’s name, and are often but not always placed in the lower right corner of the image. In a few cases, the accounts have posted one other’s images, with the watermark from the “original” poster still included.
As is often the case with artificially generated images, some of the home interiors posted by this set of Facebook accounts are more realistic than others. Stairs are particularly problematic, with several images depicting physically impossible staircases that occasionally resemble incompetent efforts to imitate M.C. Escher drawings. In one case, the stairs and the railing go in completely different directions partway up the stairwell, which leads to a hallway far too narrow for a human to traverse; other images contain similar glitches. These obvious problems with the images do not seem to have deterred the account operators from posting them, however.