Prior to November of 2022, the topic of synthetic media was largely buried within academic journals, constrained to conversations about national security, and often fundamentally misunderstood. The release of ChatGPT, however, has accelerated discourse on the societal impacts of synthetic media. This study first highlights several gaps within existing literature on synthetic media, structuring the impact potential and limitations of synthetic media threats within a theoretical framework. Second, it identifies financial information environments as prime candidates for future disruption via synthetic text modalities, proposing an experimental survey for measuring the influential power of synthetic financial text on global investment communities. Rather than merely assessing the ability of survey participants to distinguish genuine from synthetic text, the experiment contained within this study measures synthetic media influence by observing its ability to manipulate belief via a series of behavioral variables. The results indicate that synthetic text can significantly shift investor sentiment away from what it might otherwise have been under truthful information conditions. Furthermore, synthetic financial text demonstrated a unique ability to "convert" investors, inspiring extreme changes in outlook about a company compared to genuine financial texts. This trend should inspire concern within the global financial community, particularly given the historical vulnerability of equity markets to investor sentiment shocks.

翻译：2022年11月之前，合成媒体的话题主要埋藏在学术期刊中，局限于国家安全讨论，且常被根本性误解。然而，ChatGPT的发布加速了关于合成媒体社会影响的讨论。本研究首先梳理了现有合成媒体文献中的若干空白，在理论框架内构建了合成媒体威胁的潜在影响与局限性。其次，研究将金融信息环境识别为合成文本形态未来颠覆的主要对象，并提出一项实验性调查，用以衡量合成金融文本对全球投资社区的影响力。本研究的实验并非仅评估参与者区分真实与合成文本的能力，而是通过观察合成媒体借助一系列行为变量操纵信念的能力来测量其影响力。结果表明，合成文本能够显著将投资者情绪从真实信息条件下的应有水平转移开。此外，与真实金融文本相比，合成金融文本展现出独特的“转化”投资者能力，引发投资者对公司前景的极端观点变化。这一趋势应引起全球金融界的担忧，特别是考虑到股票市场历来易受投资者情绪冲击的影响。