Machine-Made Media: Monitoring the Mobilization of Machine-Generated Articles on Misinformation and Mainstream News Websites

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Auteurs principaux: Hanley, Hans W. A., Durumeric, Zakir
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Hanley, Hans W. A.
Durumeric, Zakir
author_facet Hanley, Hans W. A.
Durumeric, Zakir
contents As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have gained traction, an increasing number of news websites have begun utilizing them to generate articles. However, not only can these language models produce factually inaccurate articles on reputable websites but disreputable news sites can utilize LLMs to mass produce misinformation. To begin to understand this phenomenon, we present one of the first large-scale studies of the prevalence of synthetic articles within online news media. To do this, we train a DeBERTa-based synthetic news detector and classify over 15.46 million articles from 3,074 misinformation and mainstream news websites. We find that between January 1, 2022, and May 1, 2023, the relative number of synthetic news articles increased by 57.3% on mainstream websites while increasing by 474% on misinformation sites. We find that this increase is largely driven by smaller less popular websites. Analyzing the impact of the release of ChatGPT using an interrupted-time-series, we show that while its release resulted in a marked increase in synthetic articles on small sites as well as misinformation news websites, there was not a corresponding increase on large mainstream news websites.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2305_09820
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Machine-Made Media: Monitoring the Mobilization of Machine-Generated Articles on Misinformation and Mainstream News Websites
Hanley, Hans W. A.
Durumeric, Zakir
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
As large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have gained traction, an increasing number of news websites have begun utilizing them to generate articles. However, not only can these language models produce factually inaccurate articles on reputable websites but disreputable news sites can utilize LLMs to mass produce misinformation. To begin to understand this phenomenon, we present one of the first large-scale studies of the prevalence of synthetic articles within online news media. To do this, we train a DeBERTa-based synthetic news detector and classify over 15.46 million articles from 3,074 misinformation and mainstream news websites. We find that between January 1, 2022, and May 1, 2023, the relative number of synthetic news articles increased by 57.3% on mainstream websites while increasing by 474% on misinformation sites. We find that this increase is largely driven by smaller less popular websites. Analyzing the impact of the release of ChatGPT using an interrupted-time-series, we show that while its release resulted in a marked increase in synthetic articles on small sites as well as misinformation news websites, there was not a corresponding increase on large mainstream news websites.
title Machine-Made Media: Monitoring the Mobilization of Machine-Generated Articles on Misinformation and Mainstream News Websites
topic Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.09820