AI search results often include images, and a couple of articles crossed my desktop today that spell out how some of that happens.

From Boing Boing: Facebook is paying people to make the AI slop that infests it

Churning it out is full-time work, not well-paid but enough to live on in the developing world, which guarantees an explosive secondary market of get-rich-quick grifters and tutorialists. Most of the traffic is from the U.S., all the same—presumably the people crudely derided as "boomers" who either don't know what they're looking at or are so immersed in the online shit vortex that they will never know anything again.

From 404: Where Facebook's AI Slop Comes From

Scrolling down a bit:

He scrolls through the page, titled “Anita Kumari,” which has 112,000 followers and almost exclusively posts images of emaciated, AI-generated people, natural disasters, and starving children. He pauses on another image of a man being eaten by bugs. “They are getting so many likes,” he says. “They got 700 likes within 2-4 hours. They must have earned $100 from just this one photo. Facebook now pays you $100 for 1,000 likes … you must be wondering where you can get these images from. Don’t worry. I’ll show you how to create images with the help of AI.”

The second article is a members-only story where you can see a couple of paragraphs before the paywall message. However, I use a Chrome browser extension called JustRead that opens a screen minus the ads, photos, and other clutter on the page. It can quite often show you the entire article, as it did with this one.