On Monday morning, an ominous-looking tweet was posted by the verified Bloomberg Feed Twitter account. The tweet read, “Initial Report – Large Explosion near The Pentagon Complex in Washington, D.C.,” and included a picture of a large column of black smoke next to what seemed to be the Pentagon. The report of an explosion was quickly disproved, despite the tweet having already been shared by influential accounts, including the Russian state media outlet Russia Today.
The Dow Jones Industrial Index fell 85 points in four minutes after the tweet was posted, before swiftly bouncing again. This suggests that the tweet may have briefly impacted the stock market. Additionally, the S&P 500 momentarily fell by 0.26% as a result of the news, but it swiftly recovered once it was discovered that this was a fraud.
The recent hoax, which involved another AI-generated image, has deceived some users on social media. However, it seems that the incident has caused minimal harm. The Bloomberg Feed account, which was not affiliated with the actual Bloomberg media outlet, has been suspended by Twitter. Local authorities quickly debunked the report within 20 minutes of its initial release. This hoax is the most recent example of AI-generated images that have misled social media users.
According to Nate Hiner, a captain with the fire department in Arlington, Virginia, home to the Pentagon, “Just looking at the image itself, that’s not the Pentagon.“I have no idea what that building is. There’s no building that looks like that in Arlington.”
A recent viral image claiming to show the Pentagon on fire turned out to be fake, highlighting the potential for mischief with AI tools in industries such as social media moderation, news reporting, and stock trading. With Twitter’s human workforce reduced, account verification has become pay-for-play and entirely automated, making it easier for fake news to be amplified by powerful propaganda accounts. The incident raises concerns about the reliability of social media and the need for better fact-checking measures.
In the past, false information and fake news have been produced using AI techniques. The Irish Times issued an apology earlier in May after it was tricked into publishing a submitted piece that was produced by AI.
California’s finance regulator cracked down on alleged cryptocurrency trading services in April and said that some of the businesses employed CEO avatars created by AI to appear in marketing videos. Scammers frequently try to carry out fraud by using “deep fakes” made by AI of prominent members of the cryptocurrency business. One such extreme instance involved a fake video pretending to be of FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried that spread soon after the exchange’s collapse and targeted users of the platform to a malicious website with the promise of a “giveaway.”
