  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.
