Society will need to lean more on “crowdsourcing and community vigilance to weed out bad information and arrive at the truth” as AI technology improves, he argued. “The windows in the building are inconsistent with photos of the Pentagon that you can find online.”Ĭhirag Shah, co-director of the Center for Responsibility in AI Systems & Experiences at the University of Washington in Seattle, cautioned that spotting fakes won’t always be as obvious. “Specifically, the grass and concrete fade into each other, the fence is irregular, there is a strange black pole that is protruding out of the front of the sidewalk but is also part of the fence,” he wrote in an email. Inconsistencies in the building, fence and surrounding area are imperfections typically found in AI-generated images, noted Hany Farid, a computer science professor at the University of California, Berkeley, who specializes in digital forensics, misinformation and image analysis. Misinformation experts say the fake image was likely created using generative artificial intelligence programs, which have allowed increasingly realistic, but oftentimes flawed, visuals to flood the internet recently.

Nate Hiner, a spokesperson for the fire department, confirmed the agency’s tweet was authentic but declined to comment further, deferring to the Pentagon police force, which didn’t respond to email and phone messages. “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.”Ĭapt. The image’s rapid spread prompted the Arlington County Fire Department to take to social media to knock down the and the ACFD are aware of a social media report circulating online about an explosion near the Pentagon,” the agency wrote, referring to the acronym for the Pentagon Force Protection Agency that polices the Pentagon. Treasury bonds and gold, for example, briefly began to climb, suggesting investors were looking for someplace safer to park their money. Other investments also moved in ways that typically occur when fear enters the market. The S&P 500 briefly dropped a modest 0.3% as social media accounts and investment websites popular with day traders repeated the false claims.

Pentagon image