May 30, 2023
You won't enjoy what happens next
Reflections on the clickbait era — and the way worse one that's coming next:
Last week, an AI-generated image of an explosion near the Pentagon went viral on social media, briefly spooking the stock market. According the Bloomberg, the S&P 500 dipped by 0.3% in the minutes before the image was debunked, making the incident “possibly the first instance of an AI-generated image moving the market.”
What went unmentioned was that creating such an image has been trivial for decades. The AI technology that really made stocks flutter was the social media algorithms that showed the image to so many, so fast.