WHAT WAS CLAIMED
Photos posted online show parents celebrating the birth of their child.
OUR VERDICT
False. The images are AI-generated.
AAP FACTCHECK - A flood of Facebook posts showing nonexistent parents asking for congratulations on their nonexistent newborn babies are most likely a ploy to boost engagement and advertising revenue, artificial intelligence (AI) experts say.
The posts' imagery, showing various couples with newborn babies, display several telltale signs that they're AI-generated pictures, with some even labelled as such.
Many of the posts seen by AAP FactCheck feature a man in uniform and appear to contain a religious reference. The couples are typically white.
One Facebook post, repeated in multiple places, shows a man and woman in a hospital ward cradling twins.
Giveaways that it's AI include nonsense text on the father's name tag and illegible text on the mother's wristbands.
The post reads: "Married for 17 years, and today at 3:00 a.m. I became a father! My wife and I are orphans, we have no one to wish us well. May every person who wishes us well be blessed! Maybe no one will say it, but we want to share this joy anyway."
Similar text updates accompany other posts.
Some of the images are clearly tagged as AI-generated.
In one post, indecipherable text is visible on the badges, name plates and insignia on the father's chest, as well as wording on a sticker on the end of the hospital bed.
The mother's fingers are anatomically impossible and she also appears to be wearing a onesie that resembles medical staff scrubs.
A similar post but with a different couple reveals the same inconsistencies: indecipherable text on the name badge and wristbands, and the mother apparently wearing scrubs.
In another post, the father's fingers are actually merging into each other.
AI expert Andrew Lensen confirmed the images are fake, telling AAP FactCheck they each display "the usual suspicious signs of overly-polished images with poor text on the badges and artefacts in the medals".
In the world of AI, "artefacts" include errors or inconsistencies produced by the artificial creation process.
Asked why Facebook accounts were publishing the fake posts, Dr Lensen, a senior lecturer in AI at Victoria University of Wellington, said the best reason he could come up with was engagement, and downstream ad revenue or page resale.
"Facebook is mostly for the middle-aged these days," he said, "and such posts are more likely to make that demographic stop scrolling and engage, which drives the spread of the post and then allows the page owner to either qualify for ad revenue or to resell the page for use by someone else with an already existing big following."
Chief scientist at University of NSW's AI Institute Toby Walsh pointed to the same giveaway AI features: "Embroidered words on uniform are nonsense; AI still struggles with this."
On the purpose of the posts, Professor Walsh said: "I suspect they're looking for engagement, distorting ranking algorithms so that they can later peddle ads, influence."
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