AI-faked news claims Gary Gensler’s resignation

The crypto community woke up to the resignation news of Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) chair Gary Gensler on Saturday, 1 July 2023. By Monday, it was revealed that the news was fake and generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI).

It all started when a website called ‘CryptoAlert’ ran a story titled “SEC Sources Confirm Gary Gensler Resignation”. The article quoted an anonymous official as the source. This piece of information was quick to reach Twitter, causing mayhem in the industry.

Posts shared by bearish twitter accounts like @whalechart also garnered a good deal of attention. It was at some 1.6 million views at the time of press.

Today, early in the morning, Fox Business Network reporter Charles Gasparino called out the fake news on Twitter:

“Breaking: As expected @SECGov PR says @GaryGensler is not resigning.”

It was then found out that the article in question was generated by AI, as were most of the other articles on the fairly new website which had only 17 posts in total. When run through ZeroGPT, these articles scored over 70%, indicating the heavy use of AI in them.

Gary Gensler has often been a target of notorious fake news surrounding his powerful position at the SEC. Back in 20 April, similar rumours were being circulated about him being “fired” from the post.

The most recent one did not affect the cryptocurrency market much as Bicoin ($BTC) remained relatively flat on the day at $30,763. It was around the same level at the time of press. Post the debunking of the news, around $15billion re-entered the markets, driving the total capitalisation to $1.3trn at the time of press.