Business
Cascade of A.I. Fakes About War With Iran Causes Chaos Online
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A torrent of fake videos and images generated by artificial intelligence have overrun social networks during the first weeks of the war in Iran.
The videos — showing huge explosions that never happened, decimated city streets that were never attacked or troops protesting the war who do not exist — have added a chaotic and confusing layer to the conflict online.
The New York Times identified over 110 unique A.I.-generated images and videos from the past two weeks about the war in the Middle East. The fakes covered every aspect of the fighting: They falsely depicted screaming Israelis cowering as explosions ripped through Tel Aviv, Iranians mourning their dead and American military vessels bombarded with missiles and torpedoes.
Collectively, they were seen millions of times online through networks like X, TikTok and Facebook, and countless more times within private messaging apps popular in the region and around the world.
The Times identified the A.I. content by checking for both obvious signs — such as depictions of buildings that do not exist, garbled text and behaviors or movements that defy expectations — and for invisible watermarks embedded within the files. The posts were also checked with multiple A.I. detector tools and compared with reports from news organizations.
A sophisticated new wave of A.I. tools makes the fakes possible, enabling nearly anyone to create lifelike simulations of war that can deceive the naked eye for little to no cost. Similar content has spread in other conflicts, including the war between Ukraine and Russia. But this war has multiple fronts, and that has led to a proliferation of fake content since the United States and Israel first attacked Iran, according to experts.
“Even compared to when the Ukraine war broke out, things now are very different,” said Marc Owen Jones, an associate professor of media analytics at Northwestern University in Qatar. “We’re probably seeing far more A.I.-related content now than we ever have before.”
Overall, the A.I. fakes included …
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A.I. 37 fake images and videos falsely depicting active war
5 fake images and videos falsely depicting war preparation
8 fake images and videos falsely depicting destruction
5 fake images and videos falsely depicting crying soldiers
43 memes and overt uses of A.I.
13 other fake images and videos
The content has become a potent informational weapon for Tehran as it seeks to shake the public’s tolerance for war by depicting scenes of devastation and destruction across the region. The majority of A.I. videos about the war push pro-Iranian views, often to falsely demonstrate its military superiority and sophistication, according to a study of online activity by Cyabra, a social media intelligence company.
“The use of A.I. images of places in the Gulf — being burnt or damaged — becomes more important in Iran’s playbook,” Mr. Jones said, “because it allows them to give a sense that this war is more destructive and maybe more costly for America’s allies than it might actually be.”
In one of the most circulated fake videos found online, a shaky handheld scene seemingly shot from an apartment balcony in Tel Aviv shows the skyline pounded with missiles as an Israeli flag sits in the foreground. The video was viewed millions of times across platforms and was picked up by social media influencers and fringe news websites, according to a review of social media activity by The Times.
The Israeli flag in the foreground was one telltale sign that the video was A.I.-generated, experts said. To generate such videos, creators who use A.I. tools will typically write simple text instructions describing, for example, a shaky handheld video of a missile strike on Israel. The A.I. tools will then often include an Israeli flag or the Star of David to fulfill such a request. Several other A.I. videos included the flag.
There is ample genuine footage of the war being shared online, too, with cellphones and social platforms giving a real-time view of the conflict. Many of those images and videos are more subdued than the scenes made by A.I. tools.
Real footage of missile strikes was often shot from far away, typically at night, with missiles visible as little more than bright lights in the distance. Explosions in real videos are more often shown as plumes of smoke, not as fireballs, with bystanders rushing to film the scene only after the munitions meet their target.
Some A.I. videos and images, by contrast, have falsely depicted war like an over-the-top Hollywood action movie, with enormous explosions resulting in mushroom clouds, sonic booms that ripple across unnamed cities and supposed hypersonic missiles that leave glowing streaks in the sky. Real footage is sometimes enhanced by A.I. tools to make explosions appear larger and more devastating, further blurring the line between what is real and fake.
The A.I. footage has essentially created an alternate reality more suited to social media, experts said, where the exaggerated footage is more likely to find an audience.
In one instance, the A.I. fakes played an outsize role in the debate online and between governments over the fate of the U.S.S. Abraham Lincoln, an aircraft carrier deployed to the region. Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Navy initially suggested on March 1 that they had successfully attacked the ship, possibly sinking it. That led to a deluge of A.I.-generated fakes depicting the ship or those like it on fire. Iranian users celebrated the footage online as evidence that their country’s counteroffensive was rattling the U.S.-Israeli alliance.
The United States later said that the attack was unsuccessful and that the ship was unharmed.
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Dozens of other A.I. images and videos made no effort to hide that they were fake, acting instead as a new form of digital propaganda that brought to life the political arguments typically made by governments or their propaganda arms. Those included flattering depictions of world leaders as powerful men, or dehumanizing depictions of opposition leaders.
One collection of clearly fictional videos offered a view of the Shajarah Tayyebeh elementary school, which was destroyed by the United States in an apparent errant missile strike on Feb. 28, according to a preliminary inquiry. At least 175 people were killed, most of them children, according to Iranian officials.
The A.I.-generated videos unfolded like short films, showing school girls playing outside before an American fighter jet launches missiles.
Social media companies have done little to combat the scourge of A.I. videos that overwhelmed their platforms last year after OpenAI released Sora, a video-generating app that allowed anyone to create realistic fakes through a simple app. (The New York Times sued OpenAI and Microsoft in 2023, accusing them of copyright infringement of news content related to A.I. systems. The two companies have denied those claims.)
Though videos generated by many A.I. tools can include both visible and invisible watermarks labeling them as fake, those are easy to remove or obscure. Only a few of the videos identified by The Times contained such watermarks.
Elon Musk’s X, which has taken a broadly permissive approach to allowing misinformation on its platform, announced last week that it would suspend accounts from receiving revenue from the platform for 90 days if they posted A.I.-generated content of “armed conflict” without labeling it as such, in a bid to stop users from profiting off the falsehoods.
But many of the Iranian-linked accounts identified by Cyabra appeared far more focused on spreading its messages than making money.
“This is a natural front for Iran to try and exploit and it feels like this is one of the reasons it is so voluminous,” said Valerie Wirtschafter, a fellow at the Brookings Institution studying foreign policy and A.I. “It’s actually a tool of war.”
Since the war with Iran broke out, the average American household has spent an extra …
$190.47 on gasoline.
For many households, that is the equivalent of a month’s electricity bill.
Or a week’s worth of groceries for a couple.
The gasoline calculation is part of an analysis conducted by researchers at Brown University as they and others try to assess the economic costs of the prolonged fighting.
Calculating the cost of war — a skipped meal or a drive not made — is an imperfect science. But these estimates can offer a sense of how fighting far away can change behaviors large and small each day, disrupting American life.
Discomfort has not been spread evenly. As the price of gasoline has shot up, the national average is now …
$4.55 a gallon
In Illinois, it is more expensive …
$4.99 a gallon.
In California, it’s …
$6.13 a gallon.
Diesel, which is used to power factories and move most goods around the country, also quickly climbed.
Taken together, the amount of extra money Americans have collectively spent on gasoline and diesel since Feb. 28, when the United States and Israel attacked Iran, is staggering:
$0.0 billion
Hunting for cheaper gas, Americans are going to Costcos and Sam’s Clubs more often to fill up their tanks.
Drivers visited Sam’s Club gas stations 18 percent more in the last week of April than the same time last year.
They are filling their tanks with less gas.
One gallon fewer at a time.
They are riding more subways and commuter trains.
They are using bike shares more often.
People rode more buses in March than before the war:
45 million more rides.
People are spending less on essentials.
More than 40 percent of people in a recent poll said they were spending less on groceries and medical care.
They are putting less into savings.
Richer households are spending a relatively small share of their income on gas:
2.7%.
Poorer households are spending far more:
4.2%.
This is not the first time in recent years that the economy has been shocked by war.
After Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, oil prices spiked, sending gasoline soaring. At its peak, the national average was …
$5.02 a gallon.
Where things go this time around is anyone’s guess. When the war does end, it will still take weeks or months for energy supplies to level off.
Nearly three out of four goods move across the country by truck.
Many of those trucks are powered by diesel, making them much costlier to drive, and what’s inside them costlier for consumers.
Last month, a tomato cost …
40% more
than it did the same time last year.
More expensive fuel isn’t the only culprit for rising costs. Extreme weather, tariffs and other factors have forced prices up for many industries. Gasoline also becomes more expensive as the summer approaches.
But inflation last month rose at its fastest pace in nearly three years, and gasoline was among the fastest rising categories.
The layoffs bludgeoning the tech industry continued this week as artificial intelligence reshapes the industry.
Mountain View-based Intuit, the maker of TurboTax, on Wednesday said it was laying off 17% of its workforce, or about 3,000 employees, as part of its restructuring to cut costs and invest in artificial intelligence.
The company said it had slowed down due to “too many organizational layers” and the cuts will simplify the organization to become a “faster, leaner, more focused company.” Intuit said it will close its offices in Reno and Woodland Hills and incur an estimated $300 million to $340 million in restructuring charges.
“We believe we can serve more customers and deliver breakthrough products that fuel our customers’ success by reducing complexity and simplifying our structure,” Sasan Goodarzi, chief executive of Intuit, said in a memo shared with employees.
Intuit announced the layoffs on the same day it reported its third-quarter results, in which revenue jumped 10% from a year earlier, to $8.56 billion.
Intuit adds to the count of more than 114,000 tech-sector employees laid off this year, according to Layoffs.fyi.
Meta laid off 8,000 workers on Wednesday, as the company cuts costs to ramp up investment in AI agents and infrastructure. The ever-expanding list of tech companies that have cut jobs includes Coinbase, Amazon, LinkedIn and more. Some have cited productivity gains enabling fewer workers to accomplish more with AI, while others pointed out restructuring and cost-cutting to prepare for the AI disruption.
In an earnings call, Intuit‘s chief financial officer, Sandeep Aujla, said the cuts were intended to make the organization leaner, and weren’t tied directly to Intuit’s AI use.
“AI is an important part of how we’re evolving as a company, but these decisions were not driven by AI replacing employees,” an Intuit spokesperson reiterated in an email .
Best known for its TurboTax platform, Intuit has branched into accounting with QuickBooks, credit scoring through Credit Karma and email automation via Mailchimp. Facing increased competition for AI-driven tax solutions, the company is integrating AI across its entire portfolio.
“Our AI agents are delivering value at scale, with our accounting AI agents powering recommendations across more than 50 million transactions each week, and business tax AI agents identifying millions of dollars in deductions,” Goodarzi said in the earnings call.
The restructuring will reduce overlapping roles in TurboTax and Credit Karma as the company integrates both into a single team.
A deep sense of anxiety has settled in the tech job market, propelled by consecutive layoffs and coding tasks being automated by AI.
Tech leaders have portrayed the role of human software engineers as a human in the loop, overseeing and verifying AI agents that do the work of coders.
By 2027, software developers are expected to see a 3% job contraction due to AI coding capabilities, according to Labor Automation Forecasting Hub by Metaculus, a popular website where forecasters predict how AI will reshape the workforce.
President Trump on Thursday announced that grocery stories and air conditioning companies will be allowed to keep using high-polluting refrigerants for longer than they would have under a law he signed during his first administration.
“This was a tremendous burden, a tremendous cost,” said Trump, surrounded in the Oval Office by executives from supermarket chains including Kroger, Fairway, Neimann Foods and Piggly Wiggly. “It was making the equipment unaffordable, and the actual benefit was nothing.”
The move loosens rules meant to restrict hydroflourocarbons, a class of climate-damaging chemicals used in cooling equipment. HFCs are known as “super pollutants” because their impact on climate change can be tens of thousands of times greater than carbon dioxide during their shorter lifespans.
In the move Thursday, the Environmental Protection Agency extends the deadline for companies to comply with a 2023 rule transitioning refrigerators and air conditioners off HFCs and onto new cooling technologies. Reducing these chemicals and moving to cleaner refrigerants has long been a bipartisan issue.
Trump is also proposing exemptions from a rule requiring leak repairs on large-scale refrigeration systems.
The administration framed the changes as part of its effort to bring down high grocery costs. EPA administrator Lee Zeldin said the actions will save $2.4 billion for Americans and safeguard 350,000 jobs.
“Americans who wanted to be able to fix their equipment were instead being required to buy far more costly new equipment and that just doesn’t make any sense,” said Zeldin.
David Doniger, senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council, said the move will not only harm the climate, but U.S. competitiveness in global refrigerant markets as well.
“The EPA is catering to a small group of straggling companies by derailing the shift away from these climate super-pollutants,” he said. “The industry at large supports the HFC phasedown and has already invested in making new refrigerants and equipment, currently installed in thousands of stores.”
Danielle Wright, executive director of the North American Sustainable Refrigeration Council, an environmental nonprofit, said any perceived near-term savings from the rollbacks will be outweighed by the future costs.
“Business owners are far more worried about the escalating cost of keeping aging, high‑global-warming-potential equipment running than they are about the cost of installing new, compliant systems,” she said.
Trump dismissed the climate concerns, saying his changes “are not going to have any impact on the environment.”
He said he wants to get rid of the technology transition rule entirely in the future.
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