A fake picture of black smoke rising adjacent to the Pentagon headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, went viral on social media, wreaking havoc in the financial market.
Before officials came in to clarify that no bomb really occurred and the photo was an AI-generated hoax, the posts briefly threw the stock market into a tremble and were rapidly picked up by news sources outside of the U.S.
The viral image, according to experts, was probably made with the help of generative artificial intelligence systems, which have lately enabled an increase in the number of realistic-looking but frequently faulty graphics on the internet.
Numerous generative AI techniques, like Midjourney, Dall-e 2, and Stable Diffusion, may quickly produce lifelike visuals. These tools learn by studying a lot of actual photos, but when training data is lacking, they fill in the blanks with their own interpretation, which sometimes creates visual paradoxes.
Confident that this picture claiming to show an "explosion near the pentagon" is AI generated.
Check out the frontage of the building, and the way the fence melds into the crowd barriers. There's also no other images, videos or people posting as first hand witnesses. pic.twitter.com/t1YKQabuNL
— Nick Waters (@N_Waters89) May 22, 2023
Although it was fake, the picture was still circulated by several publications – including RT, a media channel funded by the Russian government formerly known as Russia Today. It was also widely disseminated in the finance community, notably by an account that falsely claimed to be affiliated with Bloomberg News and had Twitter’s distinctive blue verification check mark (which for the past few months has been obtainable by paying a subscription).
As day traders’ favorite investing websites and social media accounts propagated the lies, the S&P 500 temporarily fell by a tiny 0.3%. Meanwhile, prices for U.S. Treasury bonds and gold started to rise, indicating that investors were seeking for a more secure place to deposit their money.
