Viral 'Challah Horse' Image Zuckerberg Loved Was Originally Created as a Warning About Facebook's AI Slop

The viral AI-generated bread horse image that Mark Zuckerberg “loved” on Tuesday was originally created as a meme by a Polish news organization to warn about the dangers of AI-generated slop on social media. The image became a viral sensation on the Polish internet but broke containment and began going viral more widely; it was then stolen by a totally unrelated real AI spam farm where it has gone megaviral and was ‘loved’ by the Meta CEO.

Called “chałkoń” or “challah horse,” the image was part of a series of AI-generated images created by a Polish news outlet called Donald.pl, which pilloried the AI spam that has taken over Facebook. “This woman baked a challah horse but no one congratulated her,” a page run by Donald called Polska w duźych dawkach (Poland in Large Doses) wrote on January 7. 

The image was designed as a commentary on AI spam on Facebook, the outlet wrote. But like other AI spam, some people believed it was real, and the image was seen by more than a million people and liked 11,000 times. The English-language, subscriber-funded Noted From Poland originally wrote about this drama if you’d like to learn more.