How do so many people fall for blatant AI posts on Facebook?

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boomers fall for anything on social media.

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It’s not just boomers. People run as quickly as they can to post something on this board that turns out to be bullshite. Some guy assured us a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia had been signed about 3 weeks ago. There was another good one where someone thought Musk had shut down the UK’s official government account on X.

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boomers fall for anything on social media.

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Remember the dog with the piece of ham on it’s face???

Led Zeppelin is coming out of retirement to raise money for Andy Dick

How's the truck?

People seem to abandon their first principles way too quickly on social media, just wait until you simple cant tell AI videos from real. Scary to think about.

My wife and kid were watch FB shorts on the couch one night. The kid kept saying, "Ai. It's Ai. That one's Ai too...."

Have you met my in-laws?

But also, people are more like to believe something that aligns with their beliefs. More likely to question it if it doesn’t.

Consider how dumb the average person is. Now understand half the population is even dumber.

The proliferation of ostensibly authentic yet patently synthetic visual and textual artifacts on platforms such as Facebook exemplifies a confluence of sophisticated technological affordances, algorithmic amplification mechanisms, and entrenched cognitive vulnerabilities inherent to human information processing.Generative artificial intelligence paradigms, exemplified by tools like Midjourney and Stable Diffusion, have democratized the fabrication of hyper-realistic imagery and narratives at negligible marginal cost, enabling malefactors—ranging from opportunistic spammers to profit-oriented scammers—to inundate feeds with "AI slop": low-effort, engagement-optimized content designed to exploit affective resonances. Iconic exemplars include chimeric aberrations like "Shrimp Jesus," ostensibly miraculous vegetable-sculpted religious icons, or poignant depictions of ostensibly disabled progenitors cradling progeny in squalor, captioned with solicitations for felicitations—posts that accrue millions of interactions as users proffer earnest congratulations, oblivious to their ontological fictiveness.This susceptibility is profoundly exacerbated by algorithmic curation on Facebook, wherein recommendation systems prioritize content evincing elevated engagement metrics, irrespective of veracity or provenance. Such personalization engenders a pernicious feedback loop: synthetic posts engineered for virality—leveraging emotional valence, novelty, or ideological congruence—are preferentially disseminated, even to non-followers, thereby amplifying exposure and reinforcing illusory authenticity.From a psychological perspective, this phenomenon is underpinned by multifaceted cognitive biases. The illusory truth effect posits that repeated exposure augments perceived veridicality, rendering reiterated fabrications progressively credible. Confirmation bias compels individuals to preferentially assimilate information consonant with preexisting Weltanschauungen, while motivated reasoning sustains adherence to congenial falsehoods notwithstanding contravening evidence. Moreover, humans exhibit an innate propensity to accord disproportionate epistemic weight to visual stimuli—a heuristic termed "seeing is believing"—which AI-synthesized images exploit by furnishing ostensibly probative "evidence" for mendacious headlines or vignettes.Compounding these intrinsic frailties is the demographic skew of Facebook's user base toward older cohorts, who may evince diminished digital literacy in discerning artifacts like anomalous digit configurations or stylistic anomalies in AI renderings. Furthermore, the platform's shift toward recommended content (now constituting circa 30% of feeds) facilitates inadvertent encounters with such ephemera, bypassing deliberate curation.In essence, the ubiquity of these "blatant" AI posts belies not mere credulity, but a sophisticated interplay of technological ingenuity, platform incentives, and the inexorable limitations of human epistemology in an era of informational superabundance. Ergo, myriad individuals succumb not through intellectual deficit, but via the exploitation of universal perceptual and inferential shortcuts in a digitally mediated milieu.