Floating amidst your relatives’ all-caps political rants and people trying to sell a Civil War-era hutch for $25, you might have noticed viral photos of Jesus statues made out of shrimp. Those photos are, in fact, AI-generated—and a new analysis from Stanford and Georgetown (which has not yet been peer-reviewed) found that Facebook’s algorithm is giving these fake images a huge boost.

Researchers studied 120 Facebook spam and scam pages that posted at least 50 AI-generated images each. Collectively, the posts they analyzed had hundreds of millions of interactions, mostly from real people who were earnestly responding to the “art,” unaware the images were actually made by AI.

• In Q3 2023, a post with an AI-generated image was in the platform’s top 20 most viewed pieces of content.
• 404 media reported that some of these spam pages are even buying Facebook ads.

Interacting with Shrimp Jesus rewards you with more cursed images

Facebook’s “Suggested for You” news feed, which the app started using in 2022 to compile posts from people and pages you don’t follow, appears to be prioritizing these AI nightmare pics. If you interact with an AI image, you don’t see more images based on the content of the image…you just get more AI-generated images.

What do the pages gain from this? They used to post those clickbait links like “You’ll never believe Katy Perry said this!” But over the last few years, posts with articles linked in them (including news ) have been throttled by Facebook’s algorithm. So, scammers decided to innovate: Now the pages will post an image and then add links to ad-riddled clickfarms or sketchy dropshipping sites in the comments.

Big picture: At this point, Meta is used to people clowning the content on its app. But it recognizes a limit does exist. Last month, the company promised it would start labeling AI-generated images.—MM

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Unilever is freezing out its ice cream business. The owner of Ben & Jerry’s announced yesterday that it’s spinning off its ice cream division—which also includes Breyers, Klondike, Popsicle, and more—and slashing 7,500 jobs in an effort to cut costs and refocus the company around consumer products. The move will save Unilever about $870 million over the next three years, the WSJ reported. The company has been in the ice cream business for over a century and owns five of the 10 best-selling global brands. But in recent years, it has butted cones with Ben & Jerry’s, which sued its parent company after Unilever sold its Israeli business.

Japan hiked interest rates for the first time in 17 years. The Bank of Japan raised short-term rates to 0% as the country’s economy finally shows some signs of growth after years of low inflation and wage stagnation. The move means there are no longer any negative interest rates in the world after several European central banks ended their policies in 2022. Bank of Japan Gov. Kazuo Ueda said that the negative interest rates and other measures the country took to boost its economy have “fulfilled their roles.”

Texas’s controversial immigration law is on hold after briefly taking effect. Hours after SCOTUS ruled that a Texas immigration law—widely considered one of the nation’s harshest—can proceed, an appeals court panel temporarily blocked it from taking effect. The law, signed by Republican Governor Greg Abbott last year, makes it a state crime to cross the border illegally, allowing Texas officials to arrest and deport individuals, which has historically been the sole authority of the federal government. In her dissent, liberal Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote that the decision “upends the federal-state balance of power” and “invites further chaos and crisis in immigration enforcement.” It’s not clear when the next court decision on the law will come.

Foreign companies in Hong Kong fear it won’t be business as usual after the city’s legislature passed a controversial security law yesterday.

Hong Kong has historically been the world’s financial gateway into China thanks to its common-law court system, transparent regulations, and relative political autonomy from Beijing—legacies of its status as a former British colony that was handed over to China in 1997.

But now, Hong Kong’s global finance mojo is threatened by the law, known as Article 23, which builds on an earlier national security law imposed by China that critics say has been weaponized against dissidents.

Corporate collywobbles

Executives are particularly uneasy about how Article 23 lays out prosecuting espionage and the mishandling of state secrets. Hong Kong officials insist that the law targets only bad actors who threaten national security, not “normal business operators,” but firms worry that it could cover activities like collecting due diligence intelligence and data about the Chinese economy.

Big picture: The new law could make the business climate in Hong Kong similar to the rest of China and comes as foreign corporations have already slowed their hiring in the city, possibly due to China’s mainland authorities establishing tighter regulatory control there in recent years. Many businesses have started moving parts of their staffs to what they see as safer harbors, like Singapore, while others have closed shop in Hong Kong altogether.—SK

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Dell, the maker of computers for people who have to wear ties to work, is giving its remote workers the cold shoulder.

The company, which implemented a return-to-office (RTO) mandate in February, will no longer consider remote employees eligible for promotion or to change roles as of May, according to a report from Business Insider. BI found that employees aren’t so keen:

• Insiders told the outlet that teams are geographically spread out, so working in person doesn’t necessarily enable them to meet face-to-face with their colleagues.
• One source at Dell said its remote teams are overwhelmingly women, leading to concerns that the policy could disproportionately impact female employees. For one thing, the mandate will force remote employees who want to accept a promotion to work in person at an “approved” office—even if that means moving.

Dell wasn’t always like this. The new policy is corporate whiplash akin to if Ben & Jerry suddenly announced that tye-dye was no longer cool. Dell had a hybrid work culture in place long before Covid, and CEO Michael Dell has called out other companies that enforced RTO policies.

Zoom out: Dell is making official what’s already happening elsewhere. A study by Live Data Technologies showed that fully remote workers were promoted 31% less than those who worked in person last year.—CC

Quote: “Creating magic is not for amateurs.”

George, you didn’t have to go that hard. In a statement released yesterday, Star Wars creator George Lucas said he unequivocally backs Disney CEO Bob Iger in the company’s increasingly contentious proxy fight with corporate raider Nelson Peltz. Lucas, who sold Lucasfilm (along with the Star Wars IP) to Disney in 2012 and is now believed to be its biggest individual shareholder, added that “no one knows Disney better” than Iger, as the longtime executive dukes it out with hedge fund-backed malcontents over the direction of the company. One could say Lucas finds Peltz’s lack of faith in Iger disturbing.

Stat: Someone might want to tell Jack Dorsey that intermittent fasting could be bad for your heart. The dieting technique, which entails restricting food intake to a short window each day and is favored by many celebrities and tech execs, puts practitioners at higher risk of dying from heart disease, per surprising new research. Based on the eating habits of 20,000 US adults, the study found that those who followed an eight-hour eating plan had a 91% higher chance of cardiovascular death than people who ate across a more traditional 12- to 16-hours per day. Still, previous research has shown that intermittent fasting can help with obesity, hypertension, and other conditions.

Read: What happened to teen babysitters? (The Atlantic)

In a country where some people devote entire seasons of their lives to rooting for their hometown teams, younger generations may be more inclined to watch from afar. In partnership with Morning Brew, Generation Lab surveyed people aged 18 to 29 about their interest in sports (or lack thereof). Read more here.