Fake Pentagon explosion image goes viral on Twitter, sparking further AI concerns
Image believed to be generated by AI showed fake explosion at Pentagon, sending stock market into brief nosedive
AI-generated images of Pentagon blast cause chaos
Former CIO in George W. Bush administration Theresa Payton on how the AI-generated images of a fake Pentagon blast have spread misinformation and raised concerns.
An image showing a fake explosion at the Pentagon went viral on Twitter, prompting a brief dip in the stock market, and raised further concerns about the real-life dangers of AI technology.
The purported image showed a massive cloud of smoke near the nation’s defense headquarters. "Large explosion near the Pentagon complex in Washington DC. – initial report," the now-deleted post read.
It only took minutes for it to cause chaos, confusion, and a brief jolt in the U.S. stock market. Just moments after the image began circulating on Twitter, the U.S. stock market took a noticeable downturn.
The Dow fell 80 points between 10:06 and 10:10 a.m. When news of the hoax surfaced around 10:13 a.m., the Dow recovered.
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A fake image purportedly showing an explosion near the Pentagon was widely shared on social media, sending a brief shiver through the stock market. (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File / AP Newsroom)
At the same time, the S&P 500 fell 0.26% in the three minutes between 10:06 and 10:09 a.m. By 10:11 a.m., it was positive again.
At 10:27 a.m. ET Monday, Arlington Fire and EMS tweeted that it and the Pentagon Force Protection Agency were both "aware of a social media report circulating online about an explosion near the Pentagon."
"There is NO explosion or incident taking place at or near the Pentagon reservation, and there is no immediate danger or hazards to the public," the tweet said.
"It is a problem, and sadly we’re relearning lessons we should have already learned," Theresa Payton, a former chief information officer in the George W. Bush administration, told Fox News Tuesday. "It’s been 10 years since the Syrian electronic army in April 2013 actually hacked into the AP News account on Twitter, claimed a bomb had gone off and maybe Obama was hurt."
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An image showing a fake explosion at the Pentagon went viral on Twitter. (Fox News / Fox News)
"And on that day, the stock markets took a wild ride before they corrected themselves, realizing it was a problem," she explained to Fox News host John Roberts. "But guess what? It was the computer models that were doing the buy-sell based on being trained in the use of different types of words. It wasn’t humans who fell prey. Fast-forward to today, we had a little bit of a wild time on the stock market sort of in the early minutes of this photograph coming out."
Payton said some ways to detect whether images are fake are to do a reverse lookup on Google to compare when the image was first posted to when it started going viral and to also note whether a news media watermark can be spotted on the image, which the fake Pentagon photo did not have.
An image believed to be generated by AI showed a fake explosion at the Pentagon, briefing sending the stock market into a nosedive. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic / Reuters Photos)
Twitter has since suspended the pay-to-play blue check verified account that initially tweeted out the fake Pentagon explosion image.
But Payton argued that with today’s technology, "a lie does travel faster than the truth."
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"While government organizations try to figure this out, we’re going to have to, as citizens, sort of take care of ourselves because it’s taking the government and laws a long time to catch up," she said. "For example, when you see something like that, before you make any big financial decisions, start looking at news media organizations, see what they’re reporting."