I looks like he only had 12k when he confessed. How on earth is that "Fame"?

> "[My Instagram account] has blown up to nearly 12K followers since October, more than I expected," wrote Avery when he first reached out to Ars Technica in January. "Because it is where I post AI-generated, human-finished portraits. Probably 95%+ of the followers don't realize. I'd like to come clean." (https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/02/viral...)

The article goes own to say: "With Midjourney, anyone can pay a subscription fee for the privilege of generating art from text-based descriptions"

Google says 1k followers costs between $12-$30. Getting bots to follow you for three months seems pretty cheap... could this have been some kind of weird self-promotion or an ad for the AI? He felt so guilty that his first thought was to run to the media? This whole thing just seems off to me somehow...

Maybe I'm being too skeptical, but it seems like instagram is worse than other social media sites when it comes to shameless self-promotion, "influencers" who are basically undisclosed paid advertisers, fake accounts scamming people etc.