Trains passing directly through objects? Giant tree branches hovering in midair? Overcomplicated sportsball fields? It all happens on Facebook!Although I don’t post on Facebook myself, I do have a couple of throwaway accounts that I use in order to peruse the site from time to time. In recent months, I’ve anecdotally noticed a sharp increase in the number of AI-generated images that Facebook’s recommendation algorithms are showing me, so I embarked upon a brief experiment. Using an account that I’d previously used almost exclusively to window shop for guitars, basses, and other music gear, I simply scrolled down for 30 minutes and collected the raw HTML of the set of posts I was served, as well as the “Page Transparency” sections of the accounts that posted them. The results do not paint a favorable picture of the current state of Facebook’s recommendation systems, as almost all of this content was visual clickbait, much of it AI-generated, and less than five percent of the posts I was shown were related to music, the primary topic I’d expressed interest in via my past browsing habits.if at first you don’t succeed, rename your Facebook page and try againOver the course of half an hour of scrolling, Facebook served 1078 posts from 616 distinct accounts, 137 of which (12.7%) were marked as sponsored ads. The remaining posts were mostly a mix of AI-generated images and plagiarized photographs posted by content aggregator accounts with large numbers of followers. Per the page transparency information provided by…30 minutes on Facebook