AI-generated photo of fake Pentagon attack shook Wall Street
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The photo of an alleged attack on the Pentagon it went viral, come on Twitterafter being shared from an account named Bloomberg Feed.
“Big explosion near the Pentagon, Washington” is the short text that accompanied the shot in which a column of black smoke it seemed to propagate a few meters away from a building that, on the surface, it could be mistaken for the headquarters of the US Department of Defense.
Actually that image was false. As well as the profile that posted it.
The account in question – now suspended – improperly used the graphics of the popular American news organization Bloomberg. And he leveraged on “blue tick” which until recently, on Twitter, indicated the authenticity of a profile.
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Since it arrived Elon Muskthe new owner of the social network, anyone can now “verify” their account by paying eight dollars a monththe subscription required to subscribe to the “premium” version of Twitter, also known as TwitterBlue.
The union of all these factors – a fake but credible photo, a credible account and the presence of the blue tick – has led several users to believe the attack on the Pentagon was real.
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The tweet even deceived the American stock exchange, which – according to what the Washington Post and CNN wrote – had a slight decline in the moments following the diffusion of the image. The Dow Jones Industrial Index fell 85 points for a few minutes before bouncing higher again.
In reality it would have been enough to observe the image carefully to understand that, first of all, the white building portrayed is not so similar to the facade of the US defense headquarters.
Enlarging the photo also the signs of an image created by generative artificial intelligence appear evidentsuch as those produced by the algorithms of Midjourney and Dall-E 2, to name the most famous and used examples. The windows of the building, for example, appear to overlap in places. In short, the details they have a certain disorder and some gapsand often that means they were put together by a machine.
The revolution that affected the blue tick on Twitter represents a problem for users, for companies and for investors.
Allowing anyone to have it for a fee – when previously the social network only guaranteed it to politicians, celebrities and journalists on the basis of a case-by-case identity verification – has generated a chaos that has led, in some cases, to severe economic damage.
One of the multinationals to pay the price recently was the Eli Lillywhose shares dropped 6% following a tweet on behalf of the pharmaceutical company promising “free insulin.”
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