11 months ago
42
On Monday, a pair of AI-generated images appeared on social media platforms Twitter and Telegram. One of these showed what was reportedly a large explosion at the Pentagon. The second, posted a few minutes later, showed what was reported to be a separate explosion at the White House. Both of these images were swiftly reposted thousands of times on both platforms.
Notably, they were shared on Twitter by new “gold check” accounts belonging to what Twitter now considers an “official” business. In this case, it was the Russian state-owned media outlet RT that retweeted the images. Shortly afterward, a blue-checkmark account reportedly belonging to Bloomberg News did the same.
Within a few minutes, The Street reports the S&P stock index lost more than $500 billion dollars. Most of that value gradually returned over the next few minutes as it became clear the pictures were fake. They had been generated by an AI art program. The blue-check Bloomberg account (as well as several other blue-check accounts with authoritative names) was also a fake.
This is all the result of Elon Musk’s ending Twitter’s previous system of verification and replacing it with one where $8 buys whatever name you want.
The RT account and the attack on the stability of our economy were absolutely real.
