The Facebook news feed is filled with surprising photos, highlighted by the social network. But be careful, these AI-generated “boomer traps” are looking to scam seniors. And they are causing havoc right now!
A child prodigy who creates a work of art, a reproduction of the face of Jesus in nature, a person courageously facing the difficulties of life, incredible sand sculptures… You may have already seen photos passing by like this on your Facebook walls. These strange publications of striking realism are generated by the thousands by artificial intelligence to flood social networks.
It is nothing more and nothing less than clickbait (click traps), distributed on spammers’ pages – some publish more than fifty per day! –, which have benefited Facebook for decades. They target in particular the oldest segment of users of the social network – the boomers to put it another way… –, less aware of new technologies and the dangers of the Internet, and therefore more able to react without critical hindsight. They have become such phenomena that we have given them a name: boomer trapsliterally boomer traps. Their goal: to play on the heartstrings of seniors in order to generate engagement and… income!
Boomer traps: AI-generated images to trap gullible people
These Facebook pages, some of which have hundreds of thousands of subscribers, publish an uninterrupted feed of AI-generated images. These photos are almost always accompanied by captions inviting likes, sharing and comments. For example, it could be photos of grandmothers celebrating their birthday, with messages like “Today is my birthday, I know I’m very sick but no one has ever blessed me!“or again “Hello everyone, I’m 114 years old, I made my own birthday cake with peach cream and topping, I started decorating cakes from the age of 5, I love and I can’t wait to continue my pastry journey“. This could also be a photo of a young boy with sparkling eyes, with the caption “This young shepherd sacrifices his life for his sheep, but will never have as many likes as Lady Gaga. Prove him wrong!“. Or…a statue of Jesus made with thousands of shrimp – yes, you read that right.
But upon closer inspection, we quickly noticed some problematic details, such as frozen facial expressions, spelling mistakes or poorly modeled hands. And we quickly realize that all these images are false and have actually been generated by AI! A job that only takes a few minutes thanks to tools like Midjourney, Gemini or DALL-E, and which is obvious to informed Internet users.
Small problem: these strange publications can reach 500,000 views, and garner hundreds of comments and thousands of likes. And, reading the many comments, we realize that Internet users take the thing at face value!
Boomer traps: a lucrative business that attracts grazers
There are several things wrong with these images. First, it is nowhere indicated that they are generated by AI, either by their creator or by the platform. Worse, it’s Facebook which, through the magic of its algorithms, highlights this kind of content and makes them gain visibility! However, the purpose of these pages is above all economic. It’s about monetizing user attention through advertising. The more likes and shares a page accumulates, the more attractive it becomes to advertisers. Some of these pages are even run by malicious people who seek to attract an unsuspecting public to external sites, generally to fake media filled with advertisements, dropshipping sales sites or corrupted pages intended to steal their personal data.
The comments sections are also the preferred hunting grounds for “grazers” – people who make a living from digital scams – to spot easy prey, who tend to be influenced, to then chat with them via messaging and extract money from them. money or send them to fraudulent sites. Vigilance is required! If it does not tackle it head-on, Facebook has still announced the upcoming deployment of a warning system to report images generated by AI. It was about time!