No, your favourite influencer hasn't got a dozen dachshund dogs. When scrolling through social media recently, you might have noticed posts which seem a bit off. It's all AI generated and due to its low quality and its inauthenticity, it's being branded AI slop. Both social media users and content creators say they're worried that AI slop flooding feeds is leading to a less authentic online experience - and is drowning out real posts. But a new trend, which sees people adding AI-generated animals to original photographs, has encouraged some content creators to embrace AI.

Large language models (LLMs) offer promising capabilities for simulating social media dynamics at scale, enabling studies that would be ethically or logistically challenging with human subjects. However, the field lacks standardized data resources for fine-tuning and evaluating LLMs as realistic social media agents. We address this gap by introducing SIMPACT, the SIMulation-oriented Persona and Action Capture Toolkit, a privacy respecting framework for constructing behaviorally-grounded social media datasets suitable for training agent models. We formulate next-action prediction as a task for training and evaluating LLM-based agents and introduce metrics at both the cluster and population levels to assess behavioral fidelity and stylistic realism. As a concrete implementation, we release BluePrint, a large-scale dataset built from public Bluesky data focused on political discourse. BluePrint clusters anonymized users into personas of aggregated behaviours, capturing authentic engagement patterns while safeguarding privacy through pseudonymization and removal of personally identifiable information. The dataset includes a sizable action set of 12 social media interaction types (likes, replies, reposts, etc.), each instance tied to the posting activity preceding it. This supports the development of agents that use context-dependence, not only in the language, but also in the interaction behaviours of social media to model social media users. By standardizing data and evaluation protocols, SIMPACT provides a foundation for advancing rigorous, ethically responsible social media simulations. BluePrint serves as both an evaluation benchmark for political discourse modeling and a template for building domain specific datasets to study challenges such as misinformation and polarization.

"Noise" protection can be added to content before it's uploaded online. A new technique developed by Australian researchers could stop unauthorised artificial intelligence (AI) systems learning from photos, artwork and other image-based content. Developed by CSIRO, Australia's national science agency, in partnership with the Cyber Security Cooperative Research Centre (CSCRC) and the University of Chicago, the method subtly alters content to make it unreadable to AI models while remaining unchanged to the human eye. This could help artists, organisations and social media users protect their work and personal data from being used to train AI systems or create deepfakes. For example, a social media user could automatically apply a protective layer to their photos before posting, preventing AI systems from learning facial features for deepfake creation.

Social media platforms today strive to improve user experience through AI recommendations, yet the value of such recommendations vanishes as users do not understand the reasons behind them. This issue arises becaus e explainability in social media is general and lacks alignment with user - specific needs. In this vision paper, we outline a user - segmented and context - aware explanation layer by proposing a visual explanation system with diverse explanation methods. The p roposed system is framed by the variety of user needs and contexts, showing explanations in different visualized forms, including a technically detailed version for AI experts and a simplified one for lay users. Our framework is the first to jointly adapt explanation style (visual vs. numeric) and granularity (expert vs. lay) inside a single pipeline.

From books and paintings to movies and musical theatre, artists have often drawn on the stories of the Bible for inspiration. Now, social media users are putting a distinctly modern twist on this trend by using AI to imagine biblical characters as influencers. In these videos, characters such as Adam and Eve, Samson, and David appear to'vlog' their way through the events of the Bible. In one viral video posted to X, a smiling Jesus declares from the cross: 'Yo fam, they don't know that G-O-D is about to BRB.' In another clip, an AI-generated character says: 'Your boy David here. About to yeet this little stone at Goliath and see what happens.' These short AI-generated clips have proven to be wildly popular online, with one TikTok account named theaibibleofficial racking up 26.7 million likes.

From slices of toast to patches of clouds, Jesus's face has a habit of appearing in some unusual places. But this mind-boggling optical illusion might be the most bizarre appearance yet.

While we may be impressed by their artificial intelligence, humanoids often have an awkward, clunky gait. Now, experts have developed a robot with astonishingly lifelike movements – thanks to synthetic muscles beneath translucent skin. Polish startup Clone Robotics has shared a terrifying new clip of Protoclone, its'faceless, anatomically accurate synthetic human'. Like something from the Terminator movies, the 6-foot prototype machine hangs from the ceiling in the company's secretive development workshop. As ominous music plays, Protoclone twitches its limbs back and forth with its head bowed, like a puppet brought to life in a mad scientist's lab.

The FBI field office in Newark urged New Jersey residents this week not to shoot down drones or point lasers at manned aircraft, taking to social media to warn against the dangerous -- and possibly deadly -- activity, which comes amid an uptick in reported drone sightings along the U.S. East Coast. The drone sightings have prompted a collective sense of panic among residents, who have taken to social media to share photos and videos of believed drones captured in the darkened U.S. skies. The shared sense of fear-mongering has also prompted some vigilante-like responses, with some social media users documenting efforts to take matters into their own hands, including via laser beam. In the statement, released by the FBI and New Jersey State Police, authorities expressly warned against such activities, citing an increase in pilots of manned aircraft in the area who have been hit in the eyes with lasers after being misidentified as a drone by someone on the ground. New Jersey State Assemblyman Paul Kanitra took a photo of what appears to be multiple drones hovering in the New Jersey sky on Thursday, Dec. 13. Officials said there is also a concern that people on the ground could also mistakenly fire weapons at what they believe to be an Unmanned Aircraft Systems, or UAS, but is in fact a manned aircraft.

Suspicious drone sightings in states across the Northeast in recent weeks may be coming from inside the United States, according to a military expert. Civilians and lawmakers have reported drone sightings in New Jersey, Pennsylvania, New York, Connecticut, Ohio and other states, with local and federal law enforcement offering little information about the aerial activity, most of which has been spotted at night. Some of the drones are as large as 6 feet in diameter, according to New Jersey state Rep. Dawn Fantasia, who was briefed on the matter last week. "The concern is definitely valid. One thing I do believe, I believe the government knows the source of these drones, and I believe the source of these drones is from inside the U.S., especially the larger drones," Col. William Dunn, president of Strategic Resilience Group, a government consulting group, told Fox News Digital.

A social media user filmed what appeared to be drones flying over the Fairfield train station. Several drones were allegedly spotted in the skies above a Connecticut suburb on Thursday night, adding to recent drone sightings that have perplexed locals and raised questions about possible national security and public safety concerns. A social media user on X posted videos of possible drones in Fairfield, 55 miles northeast of New York City. Drones hovering over New Jersey and near Staten Island, New York in recent weeks have raised concerns amid a lack of clarity over their origin. A social media user said she filmed several drones hovering over Fairfield, Connecticut on Thursday night.