Fake news, real market drop
For a few minutes on Monday, an ominous image of black smoke billowing from what appeared to be a government building near the Pentagon set off investor fears, sending stocks tumbling.
Experts quickly dismissed the picture as a fake, most likely cobbled together with artificial intelligence, and markets swiftly recovered. But it illustrated one of the big fears behind the government’s zeal to regulate A.I.: that the technology could be used to stoke panic and sow disinformation, with potentially disastrous consequences.
It may have been the first time an A.I.-generated image moved markets, according to Bloomberg. The picture — which claimed that an explosion was reported near the Pentagon — first appeared on Facebook. It then quickly spread to Twitter via accounts with large followings, including the financial news site ZeroHedge (which sports a blue check mark via the Twitter Blue subscription service) and the Kremlin-controlled RT.
Within minutes,…
This article was written by Andrew Ross Sorkin, Bernhard Warner, Sarah Kessler, Michael J. de la Merced, Lauren Hirsch and Ephrat Livni and originally published on www.nytimes.com