AI "News" Content Farms Are Easy to Make and Hard to Detect: A Case Study in Italian

Fuente: arXiv
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Hauptverfasser: Puccetti, Giovanni, Rogers, Anna, Alzetta, Chiara, Dell'Orletta, Felice, Esuli, Andrea
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Puccetti, Giovanni
Rogers, Anna
Alzetta, Chiara
Dell'Orletta, Felice
Esuli, Andrea
author_facet Puccetti, Giovanni
Rogers, Anna
Alzetta, Chiara
Dell'Orletta, Felice
Esuli, Andrea
contents Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as "content farm" models (CFMs), to generate synthetic text that could pass for real news articles. This is already happening even for languages that do not have high-quality monolingual LLMs. We show that fine-tuning Llama (v1), mostly trained on English, on as little as 40K Italian news articles, is sufficient for producing news-like texts that native speakers of Italian struggle to identify as synthetic. We investigate three LLMs and three methods of detecting synthetic texts (log-likelihood, DetectGPT, and supervised classification), finding that they all perform better than human raters, but they are all impractical in the real world (requiring either access to token likelihood information or a large dataset of CFM texts). We also explore the possibility of creating a proxy CFM: an LLM fine-tuned on a similar dataset to one used by the real "content farm". We find that even a small amount of fine-tuning data suffices for creating a successful detector, but we need to know which base LLM is used, which is a major challenge. Our results suggest that there are currently no practical methods for detecting synthetic news-like texts 'in the wild', while generating them is too easy. We highlight the urgency of more NLP research on this problem.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2406_12128
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle AI "News" Content Farms Are Easy to Make and Hard to Detect: A Case Study in Italian
Puccetti, Giovanni
Rogers, Anna
Alzetta, Chiara
Dell'Orletta, Felice
Esuli, Andrea
Computation and Language
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as "content farm" models (CFMs), to generate synthetic text that could pass for real news articles. This is already happening even for languages that do not have high-quality monolingual LLMs. We show that fine-tuning Llama (v1), mostly trained on English, on as little as 40K Italian news articles, is sufficient for producing news-like texts that native speakers of Italian struggle to identify as synthetic. We investigate three LLMs and three methods of detecting synthetic texts (log-likelihood, DetectGPT, and supervised classification), finding that they all perform better than human raters, but they are all impractical in the real world (requiring either access to token likelihood information or a large dataset of CFM texts). We also explore the possibility of creating a proxy CFM: an LLM fine-tuned on a similar dataset to one used by the real "content farm". We find that even a small amount of fine-tuning data suffices for creating a successful detector, but we need to know which base LLM is used, which is a major challenge. Our results suggest that there are currently no practical methods for detecting synthetic news-like texts 'in the wild', while generating them is too easy. We highlight the urgency of more NLP research on this problem.
title AI "News" Content Farms Are Easy to Make and Hard to Detect: A Case Study in Italian
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.12128