AI, Opinion Ecosystems, and Finance

The paper was previously circulated under the title “Social Finance in the Age of AI: A Tale of Two Platforms.” We are grateful to GPTZero for providing access to their AI detection API and Alex Cui and Jonathan White for technical assistance. We appreciate helpful comments and discussions from Jeremy Bertomeu, Tony Cookson (discussant), Xi Dong, Winston Wei Dou, Michael Farrell, Ioannis V. Floros, Rich Frankel, Hong Liu, Fangzhou Lu (discussant), Xiumin Martin, Tarun Ramadorai, Gideon Saar, Yuehua Tang, Liyan Yang, Michelle Yang (discussant), Bernard Yeung, Anastasia Zakolyukina, Yao Zeng, Dexin Zhou, Wu Zhu, seminar participants at Baruch College, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, Washington University in St. Louis, and participants at the Third Annual Conference on Capital Market Research in the Era of AI (AICM), the Wolfe Research 9th Annual Global Quantitative and Macro Investment Conference, the NBER Big Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Financial Economics Conference, and the 9th Annual Data Science in Finance Conference. The views expressed herein are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Bureau of Economic Research.