Dealbook by Andrew Ross Sorkin NYT email column sorry no link
Fake news, real market drop
For a few minutes yesterday, 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.