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All the News That’s Fit to Fabricate: AI-Generated Text as a Tool of Media Misinformation

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  • Kreps, Sarah
  • McCain, R. Miles
  • Brundage, Miles

Abstract

Online misinformation has become a constant; only the way actors create and distribute that information is changing. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) such as GPT-2 mean that actors can now synthetically generate text in ways that mimic the style and substance of human-created news stories. We carried out three original experiments to study whether these AI-generated texts are credible and can influence opinions on foreign policy. The first evaluated human perceptions of AI-generated text relative to an original story. The second investigated the interaction between partisanship and AI-generated news. The third examined the distributions of perceived credibility across different AI model sizes. We find that individuals are largely incapable of distinguishing between AI- and human-generated text; partisanship affects the perceived credibility of the story; and exposure to the text does little to change individuals’ policy views. The findings have important implications in understanding AI in online misinformation campaigns.

Suggested Citation

  • Kreps, Sarah & McCain, R. Miles & Brundage, Miles, 2022. "All the News That’s Fit to Fabricate: AI-Generated Text as a Tool of Media Misinformation," Journal of Experimental Political Science, Cambridge University Press, vol. 9(1), pages 104-117, March.
    • Handle: RePEc:cup:jexpos:v:9:y:2022:i:1:p:104-117_8
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    Cited by:

    1. Codruț-Georgian Artene & Ciprian Oprișa & Cristian Nicolae Buțincu & Florin Leon, 2023. "Finding Patient Zero and Tracking Narrative Changes in the Context of Online Disinformation Using Semantic Similarity Analysis," Mathematics, MDPI, vol. 11(9), pages 1-26, April.
    2. Zachary Wojtowicz, 2024. "When and Why is Persuasion Hard? A Computational Complexity Result," Papers 2408.07923, arXiv.org.

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