A fake image of an explosion hitting the Pentagon in the United States has briefly gone viral on social media, causing a temporary slump in the stock markets worth billions of dollars, stoking further debate about how generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) could cause problems to societies and governments around the world.
The manipulated image, which many observers suspected came from AI, was spread by several verified Twitter accounts, forcing the US Department of Defense to comment that there was no such explosion in its headquarters located in Arlington, Virginia, just right across the Potomac River from the US capital, Washington DC.
"We can confirm this was a false report, and the Pentagon was not attacked today," a spokesman said after the news spread on Monday.
The Arlington, Virginia, fire department also reacted, posting on social media that there was no explosion or incident taking place at or near the US military headquarters, which is popularly referred to by its five-sided layout.
The denials about the explosion, however, came too late as the news had spread around the world. Even one of India's most-viewed English-language channels ran a breaking news report about the fake incident.
The fake viral photo called to mind the horrific images from more than two decades ago, when the building sustained massive damage during one of the September 11, 2001 attacks in the US. At least 125 people were killed at the Pentagon, and 59 others were injured when the plane crashed into the building.
But a quick image search by news organisations and fact-checkers revealed that the building shown did not even look like the Pentagon. There were also no other images posted by any first-person witnesses.
Monday's incident followed other occurrences of fake imagery that also created buzz recently on the internet this year, including of former US president Donald Trump getting arrested and Pope Francis in a puffer jacket.
'Expect more'
The earliest Twitter account sharing Monday's fake Pentagon image came from a QAnon-promoting site that has previously shared disinformation, though the original source of the image was still not known. QAnon is a loose group of far-right individuals in the United States that promote mostly anti-Semitic conspiracy theories and support Trump.
The fake image was then re-shared by another verified Twitter account with a blue check mark, which turned out to be masquerading as a legitimate account of Bloomberg News, further spreading the misinformation. TRT World learned that the suspect account has been suspended by Twitter as of Tuesday.
An image about a separate explosion at the White House on Monday was also shared later by at least one verified Twitter account promoting bitcoins with almost 400,000 followers, further amplifying the disinformation.
Emerging generative AI technologies make it easier for non-specialists to create convincing images in just a few moments, instead of needing the expertise to use photo-editing programmes such as Adobe Photoshop and Corel Draw.
The shared fake image of the Pentagon caused the stock markets to be knocked for at least 10 minutes, with the US S&P 500 stumbling by 0.29 percent equivalent to billions of trades, before recovering after the viral image was debunked by reliable news sources.
"There was a dip likely related to this fake news as the (trading) machines picked up on it, but I would submit that the scope of the decline did not match the seemingly bad nature of the fake news," said Pat O'Hare of Briefing.com.
Writing on social media, John Scott-Railton, an expert on technology and disinformation at the University of Toronto's Citizen, warned that last Monday's incident would not be the last.
"Expect more of that," he wrote.
"What scares me: people who did today's #AI explosion disinformation must've known it would not last. Too many people could look out windows and tweet 'nope.' But if they picked a more distant area, far from a capitol, debunking would have taken *time*."
