And to get started, like I'm just wondering broadly, how is this a topic that you decided to dive into and dedicate so much time into investigating and looking at, because you've been reporting on it for a while now. And I feel like there's not many other people who have really gone or maybe nobody else who's really on as in depth as you have on what's going on on Facebook with all this AI generated content over the past year or so. So how did you get into that?

Yeah, so I think that like the 2016 election was blamed on Facebook and like there was Analytica and all of this sort of thing. And all of the tech journalism world was obsessed with Facebook and disinformation on Facebook, content moderation on Facebook, talking about Facebook and its policies and whether it swayed voters and things like this. And then time passes and Facebook starts to feel irrelevant. Like I am not on Facebook or until I started doing this reporting, I was not on Facebook. I mean, I had my account, but like I didn't use it. I wasn't checking it. I wasn't updating it. And I feel like that happened for a lot of people. It's like people moved on to Twitter, they moved on to Instagram, TikTok, and Facebook was just like plodding along and aging in place more or less. And then toward the end of last year, I was on threads, and there was a couple like viral threads where people were like, all of these versions of AI photos are going viral repeatedly. And I think that we're talking now months later, people have probably seen Shrimp Jesus and just super bizarre AI going viral on Facebook because it's maybe the most relevant that Facebook itself as a platform has felt in quite some time. But the original photos I was seeing going viral were not weird. What they were were wood carving images of dogs. There's a few different artists on Facebook and on all social media where they basically like carve dogs out of chainsaws. They get a big log and they painstakingly will make a statue of your dog for you in exchange for like a lot of money. It's quite expensive. It's really time consuming. And they document this process like on Facebook. They're influencers and they're also like artists. And what was happening was there's like this image of the person who does the wood carving kneeling next to a dog. And it's, I think it's like a golden retriever or something, but I don't know, there's different ones that he's done. And it was like 50 different versions of that same photo, but the dog was slightly different or the person was slightly different. So in some images, like the person had a goatee, in some images, the dog was like a Saint Bernard, and some of them it was like a German Shepherd, etc. And they weren't fantastic AI fakes, but they were AI fakes that were based on a real image. And so it looked pretty real. It was not bizarre at all. And it was going viral over and over and over again. And so it was a thread post about this. And I hopped on Facebook and I started looking for them. And one, I found a lot of them. And two, I found a Facebook group called Um, Isn't That AI? And it was a group of like couple hundred people who were documenting instances of AI going viral on Facebook. And there was one woman in this group who is from New Zealand, and she had created like a Google sheets spreadsheet of all of the different versions of this dog that she had seen on Facebook and all of the places it was being posted. And she had done this not just for the dog, but also for like a bread house, which was this guy who had like made a house out of bread. And then there were like 30 different versions of that. There was images of like children who had supposedly painted a picture.

That's dedication.

Yeah, I was like, what's going on here? She's like, I'm very bored. And I'm like obsessed with figuring out what's going on. So I basically like wrote an article about this group and these people who were documenting what was happening there. And I feel like from there, I got sucked into an algorithmic rabbit hole in doing that story. I had looked at so much AI on Facebook that suddenly my entire feed became AI and remains AI to this day. So it's led me down like many rabbit holes and there's been many stories since then. Yeah, so I have a ton of questions based on that.