EDIT: A rough timeline of events here:
- In 2024, a user noticed this odd traffic on their local network, took a screenshot of the graph, and posted it to Twitter
- After discussing the issue with other Twitter users, the original poster realized that this graph was actually a mistake with their router or something. This reporting software was reporting some other device's network traffic as being the washing machine's traffic. The washing machine was actually only using a reasonable amount of data.
- Despite this past revelation, in 2026, someone put together a "meme" of sorts comparing past predictions of the future to that 2024 graph
- For whatever reason, that "meme" was put through AI post-processing of some sort. Was the attempt to "upscale" this image after it had been passed around and been automatically compressed down by various platforms? Was it someone using some newfangled AI-assisted compression technique in an attempt to create a smaller file size than any of the more traditional compression techniques? No idea. For whatever reason, it seems someone put it through some sort of AI post-processing that left the image with some nonsense text on the graph portion.
- I saw this "meme" and decided to share it here without scrutinizing the text on the graph. As mentioned in my first point, this graph was originally posted years ago, so I was already familiar with it and did not feel the need to read into it in the image I was sharing. I felt safe assuming it was just the same graph that I remember seeing years back.
- After users here called out the nonsense text, I just recreated the "meme" from scratch. I grabbed the original screenshot of the graph from Twitter and a stock photo of clouds, and just placed some text on the image so that this is more-or-less the same exact "meme", but without the AI gibberish
It’s been around for several years. It’s probably been passed around so much that the image quality degraded and someone sharpened it with AI which disrupted the text.
I saw this probably 6-7 years ago on reddit, the answer was that the appliance was attempting to download and install an update, then failing the update for some reason, so it was constantly re-downloading the patch all day.
Nothing nefarious or AI slop (other that some crappy image correction) about this.
Interesting. The image seems to have been fixed now, I didn’t know that’s possible. As for your theory, it would then show download traffic, not upload like seen here. I hope the washing machine got fixed too.