We analyze over 27,000 social media livestreams by Chinese mutual funds to investigate whether they achieve regulators’ goal of improving retail investment decisions. Our findings indicate that livestreams generate significant inflows, often within minutes of their start times. Yet rather than educating investors, livestreams amplify return-chasing behavior and predict sharp declines in fund performance. Investors who buy in response to livestreams would earn higher returns by holding index funds or even cash. Further analyses using deep learning algorithms reveal that livestreams are more persuasive when speakers are more physically attractive, use more positive language, and sound more excited. We conclude that livestreams primarily function as persuasive advertising and that regulators should be wary of educational efforts led by sellers of consumer financial products. We also conclude that prior evidence on the benefits of firms’ social media use in equity markets does not extend to financial product markets in this setting.

ABSTRACT Generative artificial intelligence (GAI) will likely alter many aspects of the financial reporting process and spawn a deep stream of academic research. We take an early step by examining the extent to which firms have begun using GAI in one important part of the reporting process: writing disclosures. We begin by evaluating a commercial tool's ability to detect GAI writing in disclosures, and we find that it reliably identifies even very small amounts of GAI usage in realistic samples. We then examine firms’ actual earnings press releases, conference call prepared remarks, risk factors, MD&As, and IPO filings through 2024 and find statistically significant GAI usage in all five disclosure types, with up to 4.5% of new text written by GAI in 2024. Usage is predictably higher in the cross‐section, and filings with higher GAI have systematically different linguistic properties. Our study provides early insights into the use and effects of GAI in financial reporting, and it motivates future research in this evolving area.