My investigation reveals that the AI images we see on Facebook are an evolution of a Facebook spam economy that has existed for years, driven by social media influencers, guides, services, and businesses in places like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Thailand, and Vietnam, where the payouts generated by this content, which seems marginal by U.S. standards, goes further. The spam comes from a mix of people manually creating images on their phones using off-the-shelf tools like Microsoft’s AI Image Creator to larger operations that use automated software to spam the platform. I also know that their methods work because I used them to flood Facebook with AI slop myself as a test.