• Facebook Marketplace sellers are using images of women to draw attention to items for sale.
• There's just one thing: The women aren't real. They're AI-generated.
• I talked to one seller who said the tactic got him a lot of views, but not necessarily more sales.

Let's say you've got a 2013 Jeep Wrangler you want to sell. It's a great car — low mileage, good condition, and a custom-lifted suspension. But there's a lot of Jeep Wranglers out there on Facebook Marketplace — how do you make your listing stand out?

For Rogelio Llamas, it was a little sex appeal that was missing. He added an image of a woman in a bikini top, denim shorts, and cowboy boots leaning on the hood of his Wrangler. Now there's a way to draw eyeballs. Just one thing: The woman wasn't real. Llamas generated her with AI.

Llamas, who's in Southern California, is part of a trend I've seen on Facebook Marketplace lately. He told me he got the idea from a YouTuber who makes videos about how to buy items at thrift stores and resell them for a profit.

On Reddit and social media, people have started to notice a strange new trend: scantily clad AI-generated women propped up against everything from cars to dump trucks to other items for sale.

In one listing for a motorcycle, a hot goth girl appears to be sitting on it. In another, three women in nearly identical outfits (yet slightly too tall) lounge across a 2010 Mercedes. In a listing for what appears to be a dilapidated hot tub, three young women in tank tops and short shorts sit atop the filthy plastic.

On X, someone found a listing for some kind of Caterpillar heavy machinery equipment — featuring a sexy woman in a bathing suit posing on the rusted metal. All had hallmarks of AI images — strange figures, slightly off sizes, and generally improbable looks.

Using attractive women to appeal to car or boat buyers isn't a new concept by any means. Sex sells! But the addition of AI-generated babes to Facebook Marketplace listings feels new.

For one thing, images on Facebook Marketplace typically look kind of crummy. The whole point is you're getting a listing of a real used item sold by a normal person, not a professional. As a frequent Marketplace buyer myself, I'm generally wary of any listing that looks too professional or whose photos are too good — to me, that's a sign the seller knows what they have and may be pricing it too high.

Llamas said that in the influencer video he watched, it suggested using a larger body size for the AI-generated woman rather than a slim one, because it creates a curiosity gap that makes someone want to click. (Who knows if that's the case?) The fact that it seems obviously AI is intentional. "It's supposed to be funny, but also be like, damn, is she real??" Llamas told me over Messenger.

The WTF-factor seems to be a trend. In one Marketplace listing someone posted on Reddit, a seller put an AI sumo wrestler standing on the drawers of a large toolbox, presumably to demonstrate the strength of the drawers and also to catch attention.

But the eye-catching tactic doesn't always translate to a sale. Llamas said that, indeed, he got way more views and clicks on his Jeep listing after adding the photo with the woman. Unfortunately, they're not all serious buyers. "They are messaging if she comes with the car, if she's real, or they think I'm her." He said. "I get negative messages like 'go to the gym' or 'you're fat,' very few have actually messaged me for the car itself."

The Jeep has been on the market for 19 weeks so far.

• Meta might not yet have the best AI models, but it could be winning on another crucial front.
• Meta is considering major layoffs across the company, Business Insider reported.
• A top analyst suggested these cuts could signal that Meta's AI transformation is underway.

Could more Meta layoffs mean the company still has bloat to trim — or could it signal its AI investments are actually starting to pay off?

A note from a top Wall Street analyst said on Monday that any head count cutting from Meta could actually be a sign that it's successfully rebuilding itself as an "AI-forward" company.

That could be bad for its rivals.

While Meta's deep investment in AI has so far not produced leading models like Google's and OpenAI's, Bernstein's Mark Shmulik said Meta's aggressive push to overhaul itself into a top-to-bottom AI company could put it ahead of competitors and trigger a "wave of panic" as competitors scramble to copy it.

Meta is pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into building out AI data centers and luring talent to shore up its AI research teams. Last week, Business Insider reported the company was weighing up layoffs, with some managers being asked to draw up cost-cutting plans.

Bernstein's Shmulik said this could be a signal that Meta is winning on a crucial front in the AI wars. While companies can win with world-class frontier models, they can also beat the competition by deploying AI so deeply across the core business that their competitive moat "widens beyond dispute," Shmulik wrote.

"Meta has already demonstrated the compelling returns they're seeing from deploying AI to core workloads," wrote Shmulik. "But if the company can now re-design their operations from the ground up to be AI-forward, their potential cost and performance advantage could be insurmountable."

By one metric, Zuckerberg's efficiency drive over the past three years has paid off. Revenue per employee has steadily increased over that time period, with the company overtaking Amazon last year, according to data shared in the Bernstein note this week. Pinterest was the only company with a higher ratio.

At the same time, Meta's capex and R&D spend per employee have significantly outpaced rivals, according to the Bernstein report, which could point to a reason for the potential layoffs.

Investors appeared to react positively to Meta weighing up further cuts, with the company's shares up about 2% early Monday.

AI-washing? Maybe not.

Like other Big Tech companies, Meta has moved quickly to chase AI.

It has also been aggressively driving AI adoption internally. The company said it would start grading employees on their "AI-driven impact" in performance reviews starting this year, and has tracked how some teams have been using the tools, Business Insider previously reported.

Companies including Atlassian and Block have cited AI as a reason for recent layoffs, raising the question of whether some leaders are "AI-washing" and using the technology to camouflage other reasons for cuts, such as financial problems or overhiring during the COVID pandemic.

Bernstein's Shmulik said that while AI-washing was possible in Meta and other companies' cases, he said that layoffs could now be seen as evidence that the company is seeing efficiency gains.

The company eliminated more than 20,000 jobs in late 2022 and early 2023 as Zuckerberg declared a "year of efficiency," cutting non-technical roles, flattening management layers, and lifting what had been a sagging share price.

If Meta repeats a similar cycle for the AI era, it could set the mold for what a truly AI-first company could look like, Shmulik said.

"If one major player is able to redraw the blueprint for an AI-enabled organization, others will rush to replicate it... and we wonder if this could trigger a cascade of hurried pivots, half-formed strategies, and reactive restructuring across the ecosystem," he wrote.

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