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.
“As you all probably know, Facebook has been inundated with generic AI content targeted at older people and naive people,” Donald’s Poland in Large Doses wrote in a follow up post. “The text ‘someone made an X but no one congratulated him’ has basically become a meme … a few days ago, for fun, we decided to post Challah Horse in the same format, but Challah Horse turned out to be a beast whose power we didn't appreciate.”
“In the comments there were non-ironic congratulations for the creator of Challah Horse, mainly from older people, mixed with jokes and (thankfully) warnings that it was made with AI. We post all sorts of things, from memes to jokes about Polish politics. But in the end it turned out that Challah Horse went viral … If such an obvious Challah Horse works, then imagine what reach can be obtained with posts aimed for specific target groups, e.g. old people. Such ‘like farms’ can then be used in hundreds of ways and influence specific groups.”
Challah Horse quickly became a meme on the Polish internet, with companies like Ikea, OLX Polska (a classifieds website), Zabka (a convenience store), mBank (a bank), and others making their own AI-generated versions of the Challah Horse, and various Polish news outlets covering it. There was also an AI-generated video about Challah Horse warning about the dangers of AI-generated media. A real Polish baker baked a real Challah Crocodile, even.
Donald did a follow up post highlighting some of these memes, and said “the campaign was initially supposed to be a joke, a satire on the flood of AI spam on Facebook. But it eventually spread like hot cakes and won the hearts of marketers …. We would like the original meaning of this whole undertaking not to be lost. Challah Horse is not just a meme, but a warning. Because while everyone is making fun of Challah Horse, ‘like farms’ are preying on the naivety of older and more susceptible people.”
As I mentioned in my first piece on this, the origin of bread sculpture AI comes from a real image from the 2010s that went viral on the Russian internet of a man who built a house out of bread. That image has been ripped off thousands of times and has eventually morphed into what is now known as Challah Horse.
With all of this context, it is perhaps even wilder that an actual Facebook AI spam page stole the Challah Horse image, reposted it and has gotten more than three million reactions, 210,000 comments, and 107,000 shares. It is wilder still that the CEO of the entire platform is one of the people who “loved” the image.